Data points

At Braze, data means action: each piece of data that arrives in Braze updates segment membership, can trigger and cancel messaging, is immediately available for messaging personalization, and more. Data points help you define the most impactful information for your business. By thoughtfully considering what information to track, you ensure that you’re targeting the highest-impact data for your users’ experience.

Data points define a billing and pricing structure based on information logged against user profiles. Our Customer Success team can help recommend data best practices to fit your needs. You can find a more detailed breakdown of this definition in your Braze contract.

Definition

“Data points” shall refer to a billable unit of use of the Braze Services, measured by a session start, session end, custom event, or purchase recorded, as well as any attribute set on an end user profile. For clarity, each one of the above-mentioned data (such as session start, session end, custom event, or purchase recorded, as well as any attribute) set to an end user’s profile at one point in time shall each count as a single data point.

Data and events collected by default by the Braze Services, including, for example, push tokens, device information, and all campaign engagement tracking events, such as email opens and push notification clicks, are not counted as data points.

See this article’s Consumption count section to understand what data counts toward your data point allocation.

Viewing data point usage

To view your data point usage, go to Settings > Billing and select the Total Data Points Usage tab.

For more information on the data point dashboard components, refer to Billing.

Consumption count

In sum, 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.

You can find a breakdown of how Braze accumulates data points in the following sections. If you ever have any questions about the nuances of Braze data points, your Braze account manager can answer them.

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

Special circumstances

Arrays

An array is an ordered collection of items stored within a custom attribute. In terms of consumption, updating an array costs one data point per API call. If you add values to an array incrementally, it will count as one data point per value.

Nested custom attributes

Nested custom attributes refer to an object that defines a set of attributes as a property of another attribute. Every key in the object will count as a data point.

CSV

Custom attributes uploaded through CSV import count toward your data points. However, CSV imports for segmentation purposes (imports made with external_id, braze_id, or user_alias_name as the only field) will not consume data points.

Also, as subscription state changes do not consume data points, updating the email_subscribe, push_subscribe, subscription_group_id, or subscription_state fields in your CSV file will not incur charges.

Data points

• non-billable
• billable