Bring Your Own Cycles for Automated Canister Topups via the new Cycles Ledger

[icme]

DFINITY recently released the new cycles ledger canister, enabling principals to hold cycles and greatly increasing the utility of Cycles as a token

Today, in partnership with Plug Wallet the CycleOps team is excited to announce the option for developers to Bring your own Cycles for canister topups , monitoring , alerts , and analytics on https://cycleops.dev.

This new cycles payment option directly integrates with the new icrc2 enabled cycles ledger , allowing users of CycleOps to dynamically pay for recurring charges (such as canister cycles top ups), while allowing users to retain full custody of their cycles ledger account (principal id).

Right now, changing from ICP to cycles payments is available for existing CycleOps customers by:

1. Navigating to the “Billing” tab

2. Selecting “Payment Method”

3. Clicking on “Change Payment Method”.

Got cycles, but not sure how to use the new cycles ledger?

We’ve got you covered with tutorials on how to migrate from XTC and the Cycles Wallet to the new cycles ledger , including…

Migrating Cycles from XTC token to the new Dfinity Cycles Ledger

https://www.notion.so/Using-The-Cycles-Ledger-with-CycleOps-b5d19c2afc784046acf16ab01a1fc2c7?pvs=4#d074814a509640fea018dc071509450e

Migrating from Cycles Wallet to the new Dfinity Cycles Ledger

https://www.notion.so/Using-The-Cycles-Ledger-with-CycleOps-b5d19c2afc784046acf16ab01a1fc2c7?pvs=4#74fe6c7ab41d43728a050cc25d041300

Keep your funds in Plug? Plug & CycleOps have teamed up to provide a buttery smooth experience for approving cycles ledger cycles in your Plug Wallet

https://www.notion.so/Using-The-Cycles-Ledger-with-CycleOps-b5d19c2afc784046acf16ab01a1fc2c7?pvs=4#e0f2ac5f87c04fb5ab1b41600d746966

Prefer to manage everything through your DFX principal? We’ve got you covered too
https://www.notion.so/cycleops/Using-The-Cycles-Ledger-with-CycleOps-b5d19c2afc784046acf16ab01a1fc2c7?pvs=4#98b9386f953a444fa92038a26db164ab

The CycleOps team would like to give a huge thank you to from ICDevs MVP and Motoko wizard @skilesare for delivering this feature , as well as @Severin , @dfx-json , and the DFINITY SDK team for their help and communication while integrating with the brand new cycles ledger .

[NS01]

Great work. I’ve been looking at using CycleOps for 221Bravo App. However a 30% cost for using the service is IMHO outrageous.

I hope I’m reading it wrong.

[icme]

@NS01

However a 30% cost for using the service is IMHO outrageous.

Thanks for the feedback Nathan!

Running an application on the Internet Computer is extremely cost effective , so even with a moderately burning application that burns 100T a year, the cost comes out to 30T cycles a year - on the order of $30 USD/yr or $2.5/month, essentially less than a cup of coffee

That being said, keep in mind that the CycleOps service isn’t solely automated topups. We provide a full monitoring suite with historical chart data , topup and memory email alerts , project & canister organization , csv topup transaction history downloads , and more!

Right now the cost of top ups are “bundled in” with the rest of the monitoring suite.

We agree that if you have a high burning application like OpenChat, Hot or Not, or an AI application (i.e. burning 2k-20kT a month), 30% is a much, much bigger deal

So far, we haven’t supported an application burning higher than 500T/year ($12.5 in monitoring fees a month), but a sign of a successful application is an upwards cycle burn trajectory , and we agree that fees shouldn’t get in the way

One of the things we’re looking into right now is a CycleOps Pro feature, such that in return for a monthly fee you’d get a decreased cycles rate, alongside some other monitoring & tooling features

Some other pricing strategies we’ve discussed internally include providing a price gradation on the fee, but this is all to say that we hear your feedback, and are working on it

[NS01]

221Bravo is burning about 100T a month between new canister setup and indexers/ oracle running every 60 seconds.

Its a fair price for low burn apps but becomes a bit pricey for anything a bit more thirsty.

I can only imagine what OC or Dscvr burn a month.

Maybe a sliding scale of cost would be good - much like fees on some exchanges.

[icme]

@NS01

However a 30% cost for using the service is IMHO outrageous.

@NS01 Thanks again for speaking up regarding our pricing!

Pricing has been at the top of our minds since your last post, and this morning, we just lowered our top-up fees to 5%.

CycleOps

Our goal is to bring easy, cheap application monitoring to the ICP ecosystem. If you have a popular application that’s burning a lot of cycles and would benefit from monitoring, we want to make sure that monitoring is accessible.

One of our new mottos for CycleOps is, “If you need us, you’re doing something right” (credit to @dfxjesse )