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How do I calculate Boost Disks usage cost?

Updated

This article explains how Boost Disk charges are calculated in Unity Build Automation and how to estimate whether enabling Boost Disks will be cost-effective for your build targets.

 

In this article

  • Benefits of Boost Disks
  • How Boost Disk pricing works
  • Understanding Boost Disk billing
  • Calculating monthly costs
  • Estimating the impact on your invoice

Benefits of Boost Disks

Boost Disks provide persistent storage for a build target, allowing build data and imported assets to be reused between builds.

This can significantly reduce build times for projects that:

  • Run frequent incremental builds.
  • Have large asset libraries.
  • Spend considerable time importing assets during each build.
  • Require faster iteration cycles for development teams.

The largest performance gains are typically seen after the first build, when cached assets and build data become available for reuse.

Before enabling Boost Disks across multiple targets, we recommend testing them on a single build target and comparing build durations across several incremental builds.

How Boost Disk pricing works

Boost Disks are charged per build target because each Boost Disk is dedicated to a specific build target and cannot be shared between targets.

The current price is:

$0.30 per GB per month

Boost Disks are currently available only as 512 GB disks.

Based on current pricing, each Boost Disk costs approximately:

$154 per month per build target or about $5.13 per day.

Charges only accrue while the build target is configured to use a Boost Disk. If you disable Boost Disks, change your caching strategy, or delete the build target, the charges stop accumulating.

Understanding Boost Disk billing

Unlike standard storage, Boost Disk charges are not based on the amount of data stored.

Each Boost Disk is provisioned as a dedicated 512 GB disk, and billing is based on the full disk size.

For example:

  • A project using 10 GB of the Boost Disk is billed for 512 GB.
  • A project using 200 GB of the Boost Disk is billed for 512 GB.

This billing model differs from standard storage pricing and may be unexpected if you are accustomed to paying only for the storage you consume.

Calculate your monthly Boost Disk costs

To estimate your monthly Boost Disk charges:

  1. Count the number of build targets using Boost Disks.
  2. Multiply that number by the monthly cost of a Boost Disk.

Example

If you have two build targets configured with Boost Disks:

$154/month × 2 build targets = $308/month

Your monthly Premium Storage charge would be approximately $308.

Estimate the impact on your Build Automation invoice

To determine whether Boost Disks are cost-effective for your project:

  1. Enable a Boost Disk on one build target.
  2. Run an initial build.
  3. Run several incremental builds.
  4. Compare build durations with and without Boost Disks.
  5. Calculate the reduction in billable build minutes.
  6. Compare those savings against the monthly Boost Disk cost.

This approach provides a realistic estimate of the overall impact on your monthly invoice and helps determine whether the performance benefits outweigh the additional storage charges.

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