What your backend costs, and what it could.

Enter your game's average daily players and how many backend engineers you'd need. The in-house range covers those engineers and the infrastructure to keep a game up; the Lonca Cloud figure is our target price.

Average daily active players

Any number from 1 to 10M. You can type 250k or 1.5M.

Backend engineers you'd need in-house

Smaller game, or not launched yet? The per-player target is set for scale. Tell us about it and we'll talk through what it would cost.

In-house

$1.34M – $2.16Ma year

2 backend engineers at $72K–$180K each, plus highly available infrastructure at $100–$150 a month per 1,000 DAU.

Lonca Cloud (target)

$600Ka year

$50 a month per 1,000 DAU, no backend hires. 55%–72% less.

The assumptions

Backend engineers: $6–15k a month each, or $72–180k a year. Most casual games at scale need at least two to cover scaling, failover and on-call.
Infrastructure: Highly available, horizontally scalable infrastructure across availability zones runs about $100–150 a month per 1,000 DAU.
Lonca Cloud: Our target is $50 a month per 1,000 DAU, with no backend hires. DAU is your average daily active players over the month: each day's active players added up and divided by the days in the month, so a one-day spike barely moves the bill. 20,000 DAU is $1,000 a month. It is a target for games at scale, not a quote.
Self-hosted: The open-source core has no license fee. You pay for your own servers and the people who run them, which puts you closer to the in-house figures.
Not counted: Hiring time, the features your engineers would build instead, and the months before launch. All of them favour not building in-house.

Why it can cost less

Lonca is one modular backend, not a set of services per game. On Lonca Cloud many games share each pod, and one platform team runs it for every studio.

Today: a stack per game

Game A

Game B

Game C

Lonca: games share pods

Three games, three shared pods instead of nine, each one fuller. Every game's data, rate limits and keys stay isolated. Illustration, not a measurement.

Want the numbers for your game?

Tell us your daily players and what you run today, and we'll walk through what Lonca would cost you.

SDKs for Unity, Godot and web games.
Open source: Lonca Cloud or self-hosted.
Built for casual and mobile games with live ops on day one.
A founder answers every signup.