Manage subscription costs#
Buf bills paid plans by billable types: the count of messages, enums, and RPCs in your schemas. For full pricing details, see buf.build/pricing.
This page covers how to track your billable types in the BSR and how to bring the count down.
Track types usage#
The BSR exposes usage dashboards for Teams and Pro plans. Both bill per BSR organization on the monthly average count.
Organization admins can view the dashboard at:
The same page also lets admins request an email alert when usage crosses a configurable threshold.
Enterprise billing is governed entirely by your contract; for usage tracking and billing questions on the Enterprise plan, talk to your Buf representative.
Reduce billable types#
Two patterns commonly bring the count down without changing your APIs.
Use BSR-hosted dependencies instead of vendoring#
Most projects depend on third-party Protobuf types like googleapis.
The BSR hosts many of these as modules, so you can reference the BSR copy and delete the locally vendored .proto files.
Types in vendored .proto files count toward your billable total; types referenced as declared dependencies don’t.
For details, see Dependency management.
If a dependency you need isn’t already on the BSR, publish it once into a repository in your organization and depend on it from there. On Community and Teams (public BSR), this also cuts billing if the repository is public.
Move non-sensitive types to public repositories (Community and Teams)#
On the public BSR (buf.build), types in public repositories don’t count toward billing.
Schemas that don’t need to be private (anything safe to share with consumers, partners, or the broader community) can move to a public repository and stop adding to the billable total. On Community, the same move helps stay under the private-repository and type-count limits.