Hi Benjamin, Glad you're offering your skills for consultations. That'll help a lot of folks who are looking for hands-on support.
In terms of monetization, that's tough. There are a few businesses that are able to totally bootstrap their way to profitability, but I think we have to be careful when reading these stories to not believe that every single business can be like this. For instance, Google itself was losing lots of money every year and took several years to become profitable. I can't even imagine how to deal with losses on that scale. I come from a family of restauranteurs, and it would often take years to recoup the initial purchase of a lease for a physical location. It blew my mind that you needed to borrow money for the right to *rent* a place, but it gave me perspective on how difficult it is to launch a business. That being said, we still believe the new App Engine pricing is favorable to small businesses. For tips, there's another thread on this group about how some people are able to generate lots of revenue using AdSense: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/b80ifEOmRAc Comparing App Engine to a dollar VPS isn't a fair comparison, and many of the pricing comparisons to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as EC2 in this thread are flawed. Do know that we are paying attention to posts where people make comparisons between App Engine and other platform based services such as Heroku, Cloud Foundry, dotcloud, and others. I'm pretty good at setting up production servers, and I spent part of this weekend helping a friend set up a production cluster running Postgres, Tomcat, Nginx, an NFS mount, Monit, Munin, a deploy/rollback script, basic iptables, HAproxy, etc, and it was not trivial. One of the really great things about virtualization is that all of this can be stored in an image and replicated once it's done, but managing that many moving parts really isn't easy at all, even after it's set up. I wrote a doc about all the things I've seen go wrong and how he can deal with it once his stuff is launched, but even I can't prepare him for every possible contingency. Everything breaks in ways you don't expect (this is also true of our stuff, BTW, I'm not bagging on open source). Yes, he'll have to wake up at 2am and fix things in the middle of the night. We're trying to think of a way to make App Engine work well for education and non-profits. Stay tuned. I'm personally bummed that we couldn't make things work for you with the new pricing. App Engine isn't going away, but we do want to encourage everyone to really do an evaluation of alternative stacks before diving all in, because, from my personal experience, there are no silver bullets. When I get a chance, I'll throw together a quick blog post about some ways to export/import your data since we haven't solved that one particularly well yet. -- Ikai Lan Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Benjamin <bsaut...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm concerned that since my site (www.nimbits.com) doesn't make any > money right now, the new prices may kill it before it reaches critical > mass. That is, I have a business model similar to twitter: i need a > lot of users feeding me a lot of data before mining that data becomes > valuable - but people aren't going to want to pay to feed me their > data. > > I'd really appreciate guidance from google on the best ways to > monetize an app, or pass costs on to the users. > > I'm quite skilled at java / GAE btw, and do freelance consulting - if > anyone needs assistance in tuning their apps to run at lower costs > feel free to drop me a line. > > - Ben > > > On Sep 1, 1:07 am, Robert Kluin <robert.kl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I've not had time to play with Python 2.7 to see how much threads help > yet, but the scheduler needs work too. I frequently see under 1 QPS / > instance on low (sub 150ms) latency apps. I may be way of the mark, but it > seems like just getting that fixed would be a significant reduction in cost > for us, and a better utilization of resources for Google. > > > > On Aug 31, 2011, at 20:44, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Jason, > > > > > I'm thinking a lot of the biggest apparent price increases come from > the fact that Python 2.5 instances are single threaded, whereas Python 2.7 > with multiprocessing will serve more computing per instance. We're going to > work with you to make this happen. > > > > > The billing email queues should be working now, so I want to encourage > you especially to open a ticket via that email alias. > > > > > -- > > > Ikai Lan > > > Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine > > > plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai > > > > > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Jason Collins < > jason.a.coll...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > We are going from $5,400/month to $26,500/month (Python) - and this is > > > only one of our apps. > > > > > We are going to work hard to optimize our application because we > > > really like App Engine, but failing that, we may have to move > > > elsewhere. > > > > > j > > > > > On Aug 31, 7:17 pm, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> wrote: > > > > Hey guys, just some data collection: are you guys running Python? > > > > > > -- > > > > Ikai Lan > > > > Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine > > > > plus.ikailan.com | twitter.com/ikai > > > > > > On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 6:14 PM, joakime <joakim.erdf...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > > We are moving 22 servers away. > > > > > Already started the process to move to AWS. > > > > > Our costs went up 2800% under the new pricing. > > > > > > > -- > > > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups > > > > > "Google App Engine" group. > > > > > To view this discussion on the web visit > > > > >https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/yvS-RalUAasJ. > > > > > > > To post to this group, send email to > google-appengine@googlegroups.com. > > > > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > > > > google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > > > > For more options, visit this group at > > > > >http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > > > > -- > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Google App Engine" group. > > > To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com > . > > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > > For more options, visit this group athttp:// > groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > > > > -- > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Google App Engine" group. > > > To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com > . > > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > > For more options, visit this group athttp:// > groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. 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