

Ask HN: Google App Engine or Heroku for my first Android app backend? - enrmarc

Hi, I&#x27;m going to publish my first free Android app to improve the schedule bus in my city. My app needs an API so I need a backend server. Since I won&#x27;t have revenue for my app, I need a free hosting.
My requirements are the next:<p>* MySQL database (or similar). Less than 10 MB.<p>* Cron. One task per day (less than 5 minutes per task).<p>* My backend is written in PHP. But I think I could translate into Python.<p>* No storage needed (just for the source code, a few json configuration files 
  and the database). No photos, no images, no videos.<p>* Traffic. This is quite difficult to predict. Some context:<p>My city has approximately 80000 habitants.<p>I&#x27;m using Android &gt;= 3.0. So this reduce the total amount of
potencial users.<p>Ideally the app just has to connect once a day, the data will
be stored locally.<p>The total size of the downloaded data (json files) is 
about 10kb (two or three requests).<p>Ideally the user will use the app like this: wake up in the
morning, check the arrival time for the next bus to go to work
and at the end of the day check again the arrival time to
go home (very simplified, but the average user has the same routine:
home-&gt;work-&gt;home). Anyway, just one request in the day is needed because
I store the downloaded data locally.
There is another use case where the user sends data to the server. I&#x27;m not going to
explain it, but the data sent is just text (an arrival time)
and is optional.<p>There is just another app like mine in my city but, 
in my humble opinion, mine is better :)<p>I have never used GAP&#x2F;Heroku and I&#x27;ve read the usage and billing for both, but I&#x27;m still a little lost.<p>Thanks and sorry for my English.
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MrMeker
I would recommend GAE. It is a pretty good fit for what you are describing,
and best of all, it has a very reasonable free tier that never expires.

I have only ever used python on GAE. PHP at the moment only accepts
whitelisted applications.

Their database is NoSQL, but it does have a query language called GQL which
shares some features and syntax of
SQL.[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastor...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/)

GAE has cron jobs which can run for up to 10 minutes.
[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/c...](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron)

Applications are limited to 1GB of source files. It seems like this will be no
problem for you.

You are limited to 1GB of data/day for free, $0.12/GB after. For you
application, that's 100,000 requests/day.

It looks like Heroku wants to charge if you want more than 10,000 database
entries.

Your English is great.

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anxiousest
Cloud Endpoints is worth considering:
[https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/](https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints/)

