He mentioned that he was doing 12 requests per second, and it was costing him $10/day on App Engine. I rent a server from Rackspace, and do volume in the 12 requests per second range, and including bandwidth this costs me under $40/mo. Am I doing the math wrong, or is App engine kinda expensive compared to rolling your own solutions with virtual private servers?
It definitely can be, if you write your app assuming that you are working with a traditional server. You're very directly charged for writing inefficient apps.
I have a moderately popular app running on the AppEngine right now that initially had similar cost problems, but spending a few days with the cost profiler can resolve most issues. You have to be particularly smart about caching and datastore queries. What I found in the end was that after proper optimization, I was able to get a better value out of the app engine than with a normal VPS - but it definitely takes some extra work to get there.
timothyb89 is quite right. The cost wasn't just for a standard server, much of that came from the number of datastore reads I was performing, since the original backend wasn't using memcache the best, etc. It also wasn't syncing in the most efficient way, so that added a lot of overhead. There is still room for improvement, but just with a weekend of optimization, I've been able to reduce the cost by an order of magnitude. That, mixed with the automatic scaling makes it quite competitive.
I am surprised that number of downloads for featured app is so low. Typically for Games and Entertainment apps when its trending it gets anywhere from 10K to 75K downloads a day on Android.
We got some entertainment apps featured about 15 months back and got 20K downloads per day.
Downloads on Featured apps depends on category of app and other features like Icon, Screenshots etc.
I imagine games are different because people who own games still tend to buy games. Someone who already has a note taking app that works for him is less likely to try another one.
Agreed. Having worked on a few games that have been in the Android App Store, you can easily see download numbers from 50K - 100K based on an app being featured. Though I have heard that features have become less impactful since the Google Play store was reformatted.
Yeah, I think games are an entirely different beast. I make a productivity app, which I will admit, is much less sexy than a game. I think games target a younger market in general (not having any actual data to back up that assumption) who are more likely to go download things from the store.
I enjoyed the article. Kudos on rewriting your server to be more performant and efficient. It's amazing what a motivated dev can do in a weekend, and it's a great reminder of how much room there often is for optimizing.
Thanks James. I wish it hadn't been in a panic mode, but it worked out well and the users have told me they really like the new backend. The Mobile Backend Starter was a great starting point, but I needed something optimized for my app and didn't want to disappoint new users. Passionate users really are a great motivator.
Awesome. It's a welcome relief to see a happy story of an independent developer, instead of the sad endings that we are so used to when we see such titles.
Good luck.
Thanks Jagat, I have had a great experience as an Android developer and working hard to make a product that people like has been a fun thing to do. Getting emails every day from users that like the app, even though they usually ask for a feature or two, is a great motivator.
My app was on the 'Trending' section of Google Play a couple of months ago and in comparison I received about 1,200 downloads. Trending is only featured for 24 hours and does not have as good of a placement on the store, however.
Edit: Number of downloads is more than I originally put. The graph I was looking at is downloads by day - I thought it was total downloads.
Did you do any other marketing when your app first launched? Being featured on Play is great, but what did you do in general to just get your application some awareness?
Yeah, since I'm a single developer, and not a company, my wife wouldn't like it if I shared the money aspect with the whole world. I thought people might be interested in the download numbers though, as how that translates into revenue is very dependent on the app.
I'd say I don't have a wife, but there's a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that ;)
Seriously, people use the wife or parents scapegoat all the time. In high school my mother told me if I was at a party and being peer-pressured into something I didn't want to do, to blame her in order to get out.
I am, for one, happy to see that people with families bootstrap businesses. I imagine that it can be tough financially and time-wise. So, naturally, significant others should be in the loop.
If you read the article, he did mention that his wife wasn't very happy that the server was taking 20-30% of the app's revenue. Then later on in the article he mentioned that he took the server cost from an average of $10 a day to just the free tier.
Based on this information I deduced that the revenue hovers around ~$1,000 a month? Not sure if this rough calculation is accurate though.
I guess it sort of is, hOOk, though I'm not sure how to write about my specific experience without it being just that.
Before my app was featured, I was looking online for two pieces of information, how to get featured and how many downloads I could get from being featured.
All I could find for how to get featured was "make a good app", turns out that part is true.
I couldn't find anything for what to expect as a result of being featured. Some people shared general looking graphs, but I'm sharing actual numbers so that people can have an idea of the process, and the result, of being featured.
