Pricing

squid by arc46 is licensed based on the total amount of entities retrieved and returned in one call.

Every entity - regardless of where in the JSON it is rendered - counts as a retrieved entity.

Tier	Entities	Price / Month	non-prod	prod	Comments
Trial	Unlimited	$0			Trial may be extended once.
Development	Unlimited	$500			You may request a limited license to test your expected production license.
Small	5 000	$500
Medium	50 000	$1 000
Large	100 000	$2 000
Unlimited	Unlimited	$4 000

Missing, Invalid or Expired Licenses

Instances with a missing, invalid or expired license will fail on production and be restricted to 50 entities per request on all non-production instances.

Example

cmdb_ci has references to manufacturer and vendor. Depending on the RenderType both references are counted as a retrieved entity.

{
  ...,
  "data": [
    // +1 entity
    {
      ...,
      // +1 entity
      "manufacturer": {
        ...,
        "name": "Dell Technologies",
        ...
      },
      ...,
      // +1 entity (unless cached)
      "vendor": {
        ...,
        "name": "Dell Technologies",
        ...
      }
    },
    // +1 entity
    {
      ...
    }
  ],
  ...
}

What happens if the limit is exceeded?

80% mark

If the amount of entities in your base request (without references and relations) exceeds 80% of the licensed limit, squid by arc46 will add a warning in the metadata section of the returned JSON and log a warning in the ServiceNow system logs.

If the total amount of entities (including references and relations) for a request exceeds 80% of the licensed limit, squid by arc46 will add a warning to the warnings section at the end of the returned JSON and log a warning in the ServiceNow system logs.

Limit Exceeded

Once your limit has been reached squid by arc46 will return the following warning instead of requested entities.

{
  "warning": "The licensed amount of retrieved entities (your_limit) has been exceeded. Please contact your companies ServiceNow operations team."
}

Influence of Caching on Entity Count

If an entity is previously cached it will not be counted as an additional retrieved entity given it was retrieved with the same target configuration.

The same core_company retrieved as core_company_minimal and core_company_full will be counted as two separate retrieved entities even if cached for both configurations.

The Dangers of indiscriminate caching

You might be tempted to cache all configurations by default in an attempt to reduce your entity count.

Do not indiscriminately cache entities!

squid by arc46 is highly optimized to export large amounts of data efficiently. Being able to cache diligently is part of this optimization. Retrieving manufacturer / vendor 'Apple, Inc' hundreds of thousands of times from the database is not efficient. Caching manufacture and vendor will not impact the memory load of your request (Both references are cached by default.)

But as every cached entity must be held in memory, indiscriminate caching will lead to high memory load and potentially impact your ServiceNow instance.