An Active Hour is an hour that an instance of an application is up and serving requests. ... While we believe the number of Active Hours included in each plan is generous, to reduce the rate of Active Hour consumption you can shorten the time an application remains ready to respond if users are idle. By default it is set to 15 minutes.
Does that mean that any app will consume the same number of hours regardless of how much resources it takes up?
For the Free tier, you are limited to 25 hours a month. Does that mean you can only get about an hour of usage per day with that plan? That means 100 visits a month (assuming they are more than 15 minutes apart). Even the paid Starter tier is 100 hours, which is 400 visits or about 13 visits a day. That seems very limited. A single user can reach that. Am I interpreting the hours correctly?
@igor I spent some time in the past also trying to understand how it works.
That's exactly what it means, shinyapps.io makes the resources available to you as you need, which, somehow, is the same as giving them. Then it will consume the hours whenever it is used, like you just said with this 15 minutes time gap.
You're interpreting correctly, but think otherwise, you're thinking of a single user, with 15 minutes spacing each use, but in practice what happens are multiple users at the same time, and they tend to stay in the same 8 working hours range, and if there are many users at the same time, it starts getting interesting regardless of how many concurrent users you have, it only takes the same time. Of course there is processing limit, but it's not as bad as it sounds, try it!
Unless you making an app for a few colleagues, I don't think it's expected to be used for only 8 hours a month.
If the month has 720 hours (24*30), then to get 24/7 service, you would need the Standard plan at $99. For contrast, you can get a VPS for $5 which would easily support thousands of daily users (depending on the complexity of the app). There is a blog post that describes that in more detail.
Can it really be possible that multiple paid tiers will not get you 24/7 uptime?