If you use Braze, you likely understand how Braze's pricing model can make it challenging for you to expand your campaigns while staying within budget.
Many Braze users have voiced frustration over the platform's confusing pricing structure. One reviewer even noted, "The pricing can feel like a bit of a black box, with certain add-ons requiring extra spending."
That’s where Census comes in. With Census, you can accurately predict Braze API costs and optimize your Data Point spend, especially if you have a large userbase or complex personalization needs.
Let’s dive into more detail.
Key Takeaways
- Braze is known to have an unpredictable pricing model based on volume of Data Points consumed, which has led to scalability issues for many companies.
- Census can minimize costs on Braze with granular diffing and only syncing specific Data Points that have actually changed.
- Census dry runs can help estimate the number of Data Point writes for every sync, making Braze easier to use despite its complex pricing structure.
What Are Braze’s Data Point Costs and API Limits?
Braze’s Data Point costs are charges that occur when sending and processing data in the Braze platform. Data points are accumulated when a user’s profile data is updated or when they perform specific actions. Essentially, data points are counts of each of your user’s session starts, session ends, events, and purchases, as well as any attribute set to an end user’s profile.
Braze counts every action as a data point, which is vital for determining your data use. In other words, data points are key indicators of how much data you use while on the Braze platform.
Actions on user profiles, such as changes undertaken through CSV, API, or SDK, are categorized as data points. This means that companies running large-scale campaigns and complex data processes will incur high costs associated with their data points.
Braze API Rate Limits
API rate limits apply when businesses use Braze's Application Programming Interface (API) to automate data transfers, personalize customer journeys, or trigger real-time messages.
Braze limits the volume of API calls made within a specific time frame, restricting how much data can be processed simultaneously. For example, when updating user profile attributes, Braze users are limited to 3,000 requests every three seconds. For a full table of Braze’s API limits, refer to the documentation here.
Inefficient data integration can eat up API limits and pose significant scalability challenges for businesses with large-scale marketing campaigns. For example, some may have to limit the amount of data they import. These API limits and data point costs can make it difficult for businesses with extensive data to fully leverage Braze.
Here are a few more things to note regarding data point limits:
Braze Data Categories
Your overall data point allotment includes session data, custom events standard attributes, custom attributes, and purchase events logged to Braze. However, out-of-the-box data doesn't count towards your data point allotment.
CSV Imports
Data uploaded through CSV import adds to your data point allotment. This includes 'NULL' values you send. However, updating subscription statuses and blank values doesn’t consume data points.
Which Braze Features Don’t Incur Data Charges?
The following actions do not consume data points:
- Deleting users from Braze
- Using Connected Content in messaging
- Subscription state changes globally and around subscription groups
- Renaming your users’ external IDs through API calls
- Blocking events, attributes, or event properties
Segment Extensions help you avoid data point use. Segment Extensions help you build segments based on customer activity in the past 2 years (730 days). For example, Braze segmentation allows you to find users who have purchased a specific product in their lifetime. Using event properties within Segment Extensions does not impact data point usage, as they are based on historical data.
However, there are potential drawbacks to using Segment Extensions. Segments can require up to 60 minutes to refresh because of data processing times. Additionally, segments that query data such as SQL Segments and CDI Segments can result in additional costs outside of Braze. Because refreshes re-run your segment’s query, each refresh for SQL segments will consume SQL segment credits, and each refresh for CDI segments will incur a cost within your third-party data warehouse.
External data sources such as API-triggered delivery, API-triggered properties, and Connected Content also don't add to your data points.
Blocklisting Data
Blocklisting data can ensure that you don't use extra data points from purchase events, specific custom attributes, and custom events.
What Others Say About Braze’s Data Point Costs
While all Braze users have different opinions on the platform, there is a general feeling that it can be expensive, especially for companies dealing with large amounts of data. According to one user, “One of the reasons why Braze was out of the question initially was how expensive it was to send data points over to them.” This user was commenting that the costs of using Braze can quickly add up, making it harder to justify the investment, and “out of the question” for many companies.
Another reviewer on G2 noted that the platform's cost structure can be frustrating, stating “The cost for data usage limits us from importing all of our data.” This means if you rely on comprehensive customer profiles, Braze’s pricing model may force you to compromise on the amount of data they can effectively use.
Equally, another user felt that the price is too high for smaller businesses, saying “The price is a little high for the smaller businesses and the fact that each piece of data transfer is an additional credit used” (G2 review). These limitations have forced some users to restrict the amount of data they send to Braze, impacting how deeply they can personalize their marketing campaigns.
The lack of clarity makes it very difficult for businesses to create or manage their marketing budgets. For instance, one user in a Braze forum expressed concern regarding the extra concerns needed to migrate data to Braze. A Braze representative responded: "Best of luck with the data migration! This is a friendly reminder that all the new data in the new workspace will incur additional data points." This means that if your company is trying to control costs, unexpected charges for data migration can make budget planning even more complex than it already is.
Even Braze's platform documentation advises users to manage their data consumption carefully. It recommends strategies to minimize data point usage: "To minimize data point consumption, we recommend setting up a program to prevent sending the same unchanging data and only passing new and relevant data to Braze.”
While Braze is an extremely powerful and customizable platform, these examples demonstrate common concerns about Braze’s data point costs and how they can affect both large and small businesses when scaling their marketing campaigns.
How Census Helps Optimize Braze Costs
Recently, Braze named Census their Technology Partner of the Year because Census helps joint customers such as Canva, Activision, and Pret-a-Manger leverage more data while optimizing costs.
Again, Braze charges per data point when syncing customer data. The costs can add up quickly especially for enterprises or Product-Led Growth companies with lots of users and lots of data.
Census offers a robust data syncing engine that optimizes data integration to Braze, so you only send the specific data points that have actually changed. This unique architecture helps minimize data point consumption and, in turn, reduces costs associated with Braze’s pricing model. Here’s how:
Data Point Optimization
Here's how data point optimization works: Census uses its proprietary "BrazeDiff" technology to calculate what fields were updated since the last sync. Instead of sending whole customer records every time (Braze's default), Census computes these differences at a field level, not just a row level, ensuring the maximum level of granularity and fewer Braze Data Points.
So if a customer's email was updated but the rest of their data stayed the same, only the email field gets sent to Braze.
Census’s BrazeDiff ensures only genuinely new data gets sent. This contrasts with Braze’s built-in system, which relies on a basic updated_at timestamp to trigger full record syncs. So, without Census, you end up with an inflated bill from resending redundant data over and over.
For instance, Canva saves $200K annually on engineering costs because Census enables Canva to aggregate events, set the frequency of syncs, and choose segments of users to send events for (instead of every user).
Batching API Requests
Earlier we discussed Braze’s API limits, which can prevent businesses from sending necessary data to Braze in a timely fashion. Census’s sync engine automatically batches API requests so you can send more data to Braze more quickly, while minimizing Data point consumption.
According to the Braze documentation: With batching, Braze can take in as much data as possible in a single API call so that you don’t need to make a lot of API calls. It’s more efficient for Braze to process data in batches than to process data one call at a time. For example, handling 1,000 batched API calls requires less resources than handling 75,000 individual calls. Batching is extremely important for any application that may require more than 75,000 calls per hour.
Sync Dry Runs for Data Point Monitoring
It can be daunting to sync large volumes of data or run large-scale campaigns when you’re not sure how your budget will be affected. This is where Census’s Sync Dry Runs come in handy. They help you estimate the amount of data points written for every sync, without changing any data in your source or in Braze.
The dry run provides this information to help you predict Data point costs before making any changes:
- How many records did you have before and after the sync?
- How many records will be added and/or changed?
- How many "data point writes" will the sync cost you?
This helps every customer maximize Braze usage and take full advantage of Braze’s powerful customer engagement tools, without being limited by data costs.
Using Braze with Your Cloud Data Warehouse
According to Massive Rocket, you can get your customers up and running 3X faster by connecting your cloud data warehouses to Braze. Using Census with BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks can help you efficiently harness first-party customer data and turn them into actionable insights in Braze. Census provides a marketer-friendly interface for data exploration and audience segmentation that is natively integrated with every data warehouse, so Customer 360 data can become a growth lever for marketing teams.
Get Started with Census to Cut Costs on Braze
Here’s how Census helps you leverage Braze for maximum efficiency:
- Deep Integrations: Supercharge Braze with first-party data with Census’s powerful syncing engine that easily scales to billions of rows.
- Cost Optimization: Minimize and forecast Braze Data point costs with without worrying about API limits or data errors.
- Data Controls: Ensure data security and governance with Census’s observability toolkit, end-to-end encryption, and PII masking.
Start using Census today to start streamlining data integration with Braze and optimizing your Braze costs. Census helps businesses supercharge Braze with all the data they need, minimize costs and API calls, and monitor data flows so you never have to worry about unexpected issues.
Schedule a call or start a free trial today to improve your Braze experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a data point in Braze?
In Braze, a data point refers to a single unit of information processed through the platform. This includes user actions, attribute updates, and any event-based interaction. Each data point is counted whenever a customer engages with a campaign, a user profile is updated, or information is tracked via an API.
Data points accumulate from various interactions, including email opens, push notifications, and in-app messages, contributing to Braze’s pricing structure. Braze's documentation outlines that the more interactions and data syncing your business performs, the more data points are consumed and charged.
What are the API limits for Braze?
Braze enforces specific API rate limits to ensure efficient platform performance and prevent overloading their servers. These limits vary based on the type of request made, including user data updates, message sending, and event tracking.
For example, user data requests are limited to 250,000 API calls per hour, while event-based interactions can reach up to 75,000 calls per hour. Exceeding these limits can result in throttled performance or API request failures. Monitoring API usage and adhering to these limits is crucial for optimizing integration without causing disruptions.
What is the best tool to help reduce Braze costs?
As Braze’s technology partner of the year, Census is the most reliable tool for reducing Braze costs. It can help your brand maximize the potential of your first-party data for real-time personalization and engagement.
As more businesses seek to convert their cloud data warehouses into growth facilitators, Census becomes even more invaluable. It makes it easier for enterprises to keep up with emerging marketing technology, AI, and changing privacy needs.