Hidden Cost (fees) Of the Magento Adobe Commerce Cloud
Magenta Cloud has the reputation of the most expensive and the slowest Magento 2 hosting without auto-scaling build on top of the Platform.SH white label hosting.
Instead of building their own good cloud solution as many did they just reselling 3-d party Platform.SH hosting and other vendors. (https://platform.sh/marketplace/magento/)
How much does Adobe Commerce Cloud Cost?
As a general rule of thumb, if they don’t post pricing on the website, they’ve chosen the “Enterprise Sales” business model.
That means engaging with a Sales Development Rep or Inside Sales rep to schedule a meeting, going through some exploratory qualifying questions (they need to qualify if you are worth their time), then working with a pre-sales engineer on a demo/trial/proof-of-concept. If that goes well you’ll get some verbal price ranges, then only when they genuinely think there’s about an 80% chance you’re “sold” they’ll produce a draft quote with in-writing numbers on it.
After that there’s usually a few more rounds of back and forth. Your manager/CTO will want to see a discount before they approve, and your CFO/purchasing-manager will want to see another discount before they approve. Often Legal wants to tweak the service agreement somehow. *Then* you start the “on-boarding process” which will likely involve post-sales engineers and support people.
So all told we’ve got 3–5 people on the customer side and 3–5 people on the vendor side involved in a process that usually takes 60–180 days. With all that overhead involved, they simply cannot engage in small deals. The effort involved to close a 50k/year deal and a 500k/year deal are basically the same for them, so they will very obviously prioritize the latter and treat the former as a sort of “sure if they show up we won’t tell them to fuck off or anything”.
The sales rep’s goals are usually defined in “ACV”, “annualized contract value”. So if you agree to a $5k/month hosting package that’s a $60k ACV deal for which they’ll likely receive a roughly $5k bonus. That means if a rep wants to make 200k+/year they need to close 3+ deals of this size a month. If they close 25% of the deals they get from the SDR/qualification call, that means they need to have 12 of this size deal in the works at all times.
All of this is a long way of saying: anytime you don’t see a price on the website, assume $5k/month minimum. There are a bunch of SaaS vendors, newrelic in particular, that have fine tuned their process to hunt their way down into the $500/month level, but most of them are firmly in the four-figure-per-month-minimum-viable-deal business. AKA “Enterprise Sales”.
jim-at-lamp-io — Redit
You can ask the Magento community in the Telegram channel to provide examples of the process. I saw many Magento Cloud price examples over there. However, Adobe's lawyers persecute unwanted information on the free internet.
According to the Magenest agency:
Magento 2 Cloud pricing — starting at $40,000 per year ($3,333 per month)
the smallest Magento cloud is 3 servers per 4 vCPUs = 12 vCPUs.
Server with 12 physical* CPUs on Oracle Cloud costs
$7 price per 0CPU month x 12 qty CPUs= $84 per month.
1 Physical CPU = 0.5 vCPU in the adobe cloud. So, Physicals CPUs will be much better than Adobes vCPUs.
How OCPU is better for you
The Oracle CPU (OCPU) unit of measurement for x86 OCPUs is worth at least two vCPUs. That’s only counting two cores per physical CPU to account for two threads of execution: The main CPU core and its associated symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) unit. Think of SMP as a tiny core within a core that can run a second task (thread) in parallel while sharing some resources with the main CPU core.
We can see Oracle Cloud is 40 or 80 (if to count a number of the physical CPUs vs Adobes virtual threads) times cheaper than Adobe Commerce Cloud Hosting!
As Magento cloud Doesn’t have auto-scaling they can manually (so-called Managed scaling) scale up your infrastructure Vertically or Vertically for most expensive plans. So you will overpay for the hosting even if you don’t need that resources. They will scale your infrastructure up but not down. It seems like Magento 2 cloud has a fixed contract price however they have hidden fees in the contract.
Source:
Magento Cloud Service Configuration items (allotments identified in the Sales Order):
- Pricing Level identified in the Sales Order
- Production, Staging, and Development Environments
- Maximum vCPU Day Allowance — Staging (a minimum of 4,380 vCPU Days is recommended when using the B2B Module; additional vCPU Days may be required for staging extremely large catalogs).
- Maximum vCPU Day Allowance — Production Environment
- Maximum Annual vCPU Day Allowance — Staging Environment
- Storage Capacity
- CDN Transfer Allowance
- Store Views
vCPU Day means one vCPU used for one calendar day.
Overage Fees of your contract
5.2 Overage Fees. Customer shall pay additional fees as set forth on the Order Form in the event that its use of the Services exceeds any of the metrics specified in the Order Form (the “Overage Fees”). Any such Overage Fees will be reflected in an invoice and subject to the payment terms of this Section 5.
5.3 Changes to Specifications. Without limiting anything in this Section 5, Customer may change any of its Service Configuration Items as set forth in the Order Form, with thirty (30) days written Notice, ...
Source: https://magento.com/sites/default/files/Magento%20Customer%20Agreement%20March%207%202019.pdf
Storage Space Fees
By default, Magento comes with a small amount of HHD/SSD storage. 10 Gb or so. Because of Magento Cloud's defective design, this storage price has x3 factor. 10 Gb on one server with a total of 3 servers = 30 GB. This 10Gb will go out really fast with Magento. You will need to adjust the contract and overpay for the storage.
The Price of the 1Mb of the storage is top-secret and Adobes lawyers don’t allow to disclose this information. Fewer customers know easier to deceive them and sell defective products.
So, if your infrastructure was scaled Up because of the higher traffic than usual and bad Adobe Commerce performance you can be charged extra fees. This Fee is a secret of Adobe but you can find it in your future or current agreement and it is much more expansive than just cloud resources cost.
Now it is clear why Magento commerce has so bad performance. More resources — more overage(extra) fees for the resources.
Protect Yourself From Magento Cloud Hidden Fees
As companies pile on sneaky fees that result in higher bills, California has some protection.
In California, if a business engaged in deceptive practices to obtain business it may be in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law. Consumers may also find protections under California’s False Advertising Law if they believe the company made fraudulent or misleading statements.
“It is dishonest, unfair, and illegal to dupe customers into paying a hidden charge after they get the bill. Protecting consumers is one of my priorities, and our office will continue to prosecute businesses that think they are above the law.”
The statute requires businesses to disclose subscription terms in a clear and conspicuous manner, including cancellation information, and obtain affirmative consent before charging consumers debit or credit cards on a recurring basis. Any products sold without the requisite disclosures are considered an unconditional gift under the statute, meaning consumers will likely be entitled to refunds without returning their purchases.
The information contained in this article is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice on any subject matter.
Customers should know about cloud hidden fees in advice and not when the final Invoice will be received.
