

Google App Engine team answering about New Pricing (ongoing FAQ) - vanni
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/ob-kMuDAAqc/discussion

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ultrasaurus
"Based on the feedback we’ve received we are changing this $9 fee to be a
minimum spend rather than a fee a originally listed. "

That makes a lot of sense, I have a few apps that I get bills for a few cents
here and there, that can't be cost effective after credit card fees.

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vanni
Maybe you misunderstood the point.

$9 will not be a fee, but a minimum spend.

If your effective resource usage is <$9 you'll pay a $9 bill (not $9 + the
bill amount, as previously Google stated); if your bill is >= $9 you'll pay
that bill amount (not $9 + the bill amount, as previously Google stated).

It is however a good change.

Hope it helps.

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ramses0
Yes. On months you go over the old free limit by $0.05, you will be charged
$9.00 instead of their proposed $9.05.

On months you go over the old free limit by $12.34 you will be charged $12.34
instead of $21.34.

It is a good change (minimum spend v. privilege to pay) but still quite a big
change from the old pricing structure.

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groks
> On months you go over the old free limit by $0.05, you will be charged $9.00
> instead of their proposed $9.05.

No, you will be charged at least $9 every month because you can't tell in
advance when/if you will exceed the free quota, see you must leave billing
enabled all the time, just in case.

The new proposal is better than the previous proposal but it still sucks.
Large customers get $9 of value and startups get shafted.

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skybrian
Are there really startups that can't afford $9 per month?

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ramses0
For me, as a potential user of GAE for a personal side project, I am already
paying $9/mo (let's assume) for my standard shared hosting with shell access.

Now, I want to try out GAE. I do so with local / dev appserver and free junk
until I get things kind of working and start getting traffic / traction.

I guess the ~good~ point to all this is that if you are going over the free
limit (ie: start getting serious traffic) what el goog wants you to do is put
on adwords, earn $9/mo and then turn right around and give it back to them for
"hosting costs".

Really it just leaves a huge sour taste in people's mouth that this is such a
dramatic (and un-warned!) change in pricing for really a monopoly service.
Assume that you were heavily invested in GAE / DataStore and have... ohh...
1tb of data or something with them. Where / how else are you going to solve
these "impossible" problems that the datastore solves for you?

Much better to not get tied down with google's quirky (yet scalable) model in
the first place so at least you have the ability to move between competitive
providers instead of getting stuck with a monopoly provider that doesn't know
how (socially) to charge people for services.

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itsnotvalid
Now it is much harder for people who haven't got any billing needs to try GAE
seriously.

So people can only make testing app that doesn't cost anything or $9 for each
paid app. Judging from the "tick" list (marketing props) there is not much you
would get for $9 one.

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wiradikusuma
I'm glad they listen to us GAE users. I've been advocating the platform to
friends since it was first introduced. Any other fellow GAE users here? I
remember in the GAE mailing list somebody said that VCs generally don't like
GAE. Is the sentiment still like that?

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davepeck
I use GAE for a lot of projects that I've worked on (getcloak.com,
walkscore.com, wherebe.us) and the pricing changes are going to hit me hard.

I've been a strong GAE proponent since the very early days [1]; GAE's sudden
price announcement has made me question my belief in PaaS. Perhaps IaaS really
is the level to build on: unless you're using bespoke stuff like AWS auto-
scaling you can plausibly keep your infrastructure code "on the outside" of
the service itself.

\--

[1] Here's my talk at I/O 2009, when App Engine was young!
[http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/AppEngineNitty...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/AppEngineNittyGritty.html)

~~~
DennisP
Have you priced out what your projects would likely cost on AWS or other
services?

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davepeck
Working on it still...

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Info_Addict
They changed the pricing model to remove the usefulness of the platform for
small projects. Getting rid of the riff-raff. Practical evil elitism at work.

