Cloud Deployment Manager could help in the future, but the examples are Compute Engine focused, so I'm skeptical it's ready to use with GAE. I think Option 1 may work well initially, but I don't think it will be viable in the long-term because supporting and upgrading more instances will only get harder and harder.
In my case, non-commercial use is not likely, so as of now I'm leaning towards the second row of your table, where all customers are hosted in my application. I found out that customers can still run the app within their domain as described here <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2124593/google-app-engine-and-custom-subdomain/2125254#2125254> . I'm know roughly how many datastore operations my server code needs for various operations, so I think I can do a poor man's estimate of what the hosting costs are and refine it as needed. To keep things simple, I'd like to just charge one monthly support fee and have hosting be included in this, but I think it's going to take some trial and error to figure out if that will work or not. When you're small you need to tame complexity, and so far Option 2 seems the best to me. It would be great for developers if Google provided tools to bill app customers for resources used and support provided so we didn't have to do that, but they don't seem to, so we have to find another way. Maybe there is a third party that billing can be outsourced to. On Monday, February 23, 2015 at 10:15:42 PM UTC+1, Kyle Finley wrote: > > I've been thinking about this also. > > For option (1) maybe upgrades could be automated. I wonder if the Google > Cloud Deployment Manager > <https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/overview?hl=en_US> could be > useful here. At the very least, it seems like it should be possible to have > user authenticate via oAuth and upload utilizing the deploy command from a > VM. > > Out of curiosity how are you planning on licensing your app? I was > considering something like this: > > CostBusiness TypeRevenueHosting TypeSupportFreeNon-commercial0-XXXSelf - > Your Option (1)NoneXXXCommercialXXX - XXXXXManage - Your Option (2)PaidXXX > CommercialXXX - XXXXXSelf - Your Option (1)Paid > > I think AppEngine is an interesting platform for this type of > setup/licensing. It essentially allows the customer to get high quality > software and hosting at zero initial cost to them and the developer. I > believe this to be ideal for small-medium businesses who don't want to pay > a system admin. > > I'm also interested in hear others ideas and thoughts on this. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/8a503524-4af4-4b1c-adb2-1e5fba4c7fe2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
