Price for Cyclotis databases is calculated by query, rather than by database size. "Query" means each access to the database, meaning searches as well as updates: each time your CAT client does a search (fuzzy or lexical), or each time it sends a new segment to the database, the amount of allowed queries is decremented. Once it is zero, queries are rejected and your CAT tool may display an error message.

This small script can give you an estimate about how much queries you should buy for your project. Details about calculation come after.

How to estimate the cost

Of course rejected queries, due to a wrong password for example, are not calculated. But a query which was sucessfully analyzed will be calculated even if the number of returned segments is zero.
Your CAT tool may alert you if you have a database with less than 1000 (except free databases), 500, 200 or 100 queries. In the future we may add some other notification methods, such as an e-mail.

Database used for less than 300 queries is free, but not renewable, as they are designed for test purpose only. On the contrary, if you bought a table with 1000 queries or more, and you realize that you should have bought more, you can add queries to existing table for a price lower than for new tables.

To estimate how many queries you will really need, please consider the following aspects :

• each segment you translate will imply almost 2 queries : one for reading, and one for writing;
• you may return to a previous phrase, and most probably your CAT client will do a new query, even if the phrase was already seen before;
• if you have more than one translator implied in the project (which is probably the case, since this is the role of Cyclotis database!) both may come from time to time to the same phrase;
• using search screens is also consuming queries;
  

Lifecycle

Cyclotis databases are designed to be short term databases : created for translation of a long document, and not used anymore when the translation is finished. If you are searching for a long term translation memory, this is another service which we will propose later.
In Silvestris Domain, the following rule is applied : each period of 6 hours of inactivity for a table implies consumption of 25 queries: unless you make relays depending on time zones, a project of more than one day is likely to use almost 2 times this interval. Once it is less than zero you cannot do queries anymore but if it was a non-free database, you still have some time to renew the database (see in the table for more details) before it is definitively deleted.