Frequently Asked Questions

Which payment methods do you accept?

Payments are managed by Recurly, which accepts most credit cards. We also accept money transfers for yearly Enterprise subscriptions - contact us if you're interested.

What if I don't have Euros or US Dollars?

Provided you have an international card (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), your bank will make the conversion for you.

Are taxes included in the prices above?

Prices are excluding taxes. In some cases, VAT may be added to your bill and the total amount charged, according to your country of residence's VAT rate on digital products and services.

Can I try Blackfire for free?

The Premium Edition offers a free 15 days trial. No credit card is asked for starting the trial. Once the trial is over, your account will be downgraded to the Hack Edition, unless you decide to subscribe to one of our paid Editions. The Hack Edition Blackfire is a fully free subscription. However, its features and usage are limited.

Is there a free version for students?

Yes! We are thrilled to partner with GitHub Education and offer a free Profiler subscription via the GitHub Student Developer Pack to eligible students, schools and universities.
Read more about this.

How is Blackfire Monitoring priced?

During the Early Bird phase, Blackfire Monitoring is available only to Premium and Enterprise subscribers. It is priced per Traces Quota. It starts at 1 million traces per month and increments per million traces per month.

One trace is one PHP request which has been monitored by Blackfire. You can configure a sample rate, from 0% to 100%, to determine how many requests you would like to monitor. That sample rate can be configured separately for each environment. You can change that sample rate as many times as you need to control your quota consumption.

Such subscriptions can be billed only monthly and will sunset when the Monitoring features reach general availability. They will be replaced by a new subscription model.

Blackfire Monitoring offers an 8 weeks retention period.

What are Organizations in Blackfire?

Organizations enable a team of developers to subscribe together to the Premium or Enterprise Editions. Creating an organization is mandatory for such subscriptions, and for the Premium trial. Canceling Organization subscriptions may result in some data loss (Profiles, builds,...).

What Network information is gathered?

The PHP probe gathers cost information about HTTP queries made through cURL. HTTP calls made through file_get_contents() are handled when using Guzzle or Buzz. More extensive support is coming soon. To prevent any leak of confidential data, URL parameters are removed before they ever hit blackfire.io's servers. The probe also gathers the number of bytes that go in and out of the PHP stream layer or cURL extension. This includes e.g. all network calls made using the socket or stream API (file_get_content, fgets...), the curl extension, or the mysqlnd driver.

What SQL information is gathered?

The PHP probe gathers cost information about any SQL queries made using the PDO abstraction layer. Other drivers (mysql, mysqli, pgsql, oci8) are supported, too. To prevent any leak of confidential data, SQL parameters are removed before they ever hit blackfire.io's servers.

What is timeline visualization?

The timeline visualization shows individual function calls in a time-oriented way.

What is an Environment?

Environments allow you to give profiling access to a group of people on the same app, server, or cluster of servers.

There are many options to configure environments, depending on your needs, workflows, and current tooling.
Read more in the documentation.

What are Assertions?

Blackfire provides a way to define performance assertions in a .blackfire.yaml file that you store alongside your code. Assertions allow configuring absolute and relative thresholds to determine if a profile meets your performance criteria.

What is Distributed Profiling?

Blackfire supports profiling micro-services out-of-the-box. The Distributed Profiling feature enables to profile an HTTP request and propagate profiling to all sub-requests served by a PHP server on which Blackfire is installed.
Read more in the documentation.

What are Recommendations?

Any time you profile your code, Blackfire detects issues according to best practices defined by our performance experts. Resolution recommendations are shown on each corresponding profile, and are fully documented so that you can understand exactly why we recommend such a best practice, how to fix the issue, and how to add a non-regression test in your .blackfire.yaml.

What are Builds?

Build reports are the result of running scenarios; they are environment-specific, they need to be defined on the Blackfire.io Environment page. Builds can be started periodically, using the API or one of the integrations (Platform.sh...)

What are Notification Channels?

Notification Channels are used whenever a scenario is completed and a report is available; as they are environment-specific, they need to be defined on the Blackfire.io Environment page. Notification Channels are webhooks, e-mails, or native integrations with third party services (such as GitHub, Slack, ...).

Is there any profile request limit?

For regular usages, you should never hit our generous 1,000 profiles per day per user.

Is there any builds request limit?

For regular usages, you should never hit our generous 350 builds per day per user.

Profiling on production servers or development computers

Blackfire can be used to profile code anywhere: development, test, staging, or production. In the free Hack Edition, only profiling on local development computers is allowed.