AEP First-Generation Data Export — 500 KB / profile / year
The rule. "Customer may export, through batch, to any non-Adobe solution (directly or indirectly) an average of up to 500 kilobytes of First-generation Data per Profile per year through the Data Access API or any other means within Adobe Experience Platform Activation" (source.packaged-vs-composable-md).
Why it bites. A few dozen rich clickstream events or heavy transactional payloads can easily consume the 500 KB allocation for a highly engaged user. This effectively kills the ability to use AEP as an upstream data source for a central enterprise data warehouse.
The classification quirk. AEP classifies the querying and extraction of an organization's own raw data as "Activation." From the perspective of any cloud data warehouse provider (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Azure Blob, GCP Blob), accessing your own data is a commodity operation. AEP applies a governance regime to it.
Workarounds.
- Pre-aggregate inside AEP and export only the aggregates.
- Move the source-of-truth for raw events upstream of AEP and treat AEP as a downstream node (see pattern.aep-as-edge-node).
- Use Destination SDK to push specific cohorts rather than raw event streams (subject to the second-generation 1500 KB limit).
Composable counterpart. Cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery) impose no equivalent egress limit beyond raw compute/network costs. This is the load-bearing distinction in the Packaged-vs-Composable debate (tradeoff.data-egress).