Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Daniel Florey
Thanks for your input!
Well, the main reason why I came up with the approach to deploy 
applications to each customer mainly was because of the AuthSub restriction 
that each app could only be restricted to one Google Apps domain.
This was the only way to allow users to login with a Google Apps account 
and grant access to their contacts data.
A lot has changed since the initial version (OpenID/OAuth support etc.) and 
since the most recent versions of the SDK I'm confident that it the task 
queues will allow to handle thousands of concurrent tasks/users. 
This has been another showstopper for us as we have to run thousands of 
long living background tasks in parallel.

However I'd of course prefer to put all apps under a premium account but as 
far as I understand it will not be possible to add all applications that I 
own as a developer - only the once that are added to our own Google Apps 
domain as a service?
Or am I wrong?
This would be very good news indeed as this would resolve the 9$/month 
minimum fee.

Daniel

On Wednesday, November 9, 2011 3:49:56 PM UTC+1, Jon McAlister wrote:
>
> Are there other reasons holding you back? I ask because the two you
> have listed could both be overcome. The simplest design I could
> imagine would be for you to code your own authorization and accounting
> system within your app. It would take some work, but would presumably
> pay for itself in terms of keeping your customers and also gaining new
> customers. That is, the app would accept login from all Google
> accounts, but then your code checks the accounts against ACLs
> maintained by the app itself. You'd need to also write an admin page
> to allow the customer to add or remove folks from the ACL, but this is
> also somewhat better because now you could control the UI here. In
> terms of accounting, one simple solution would be for you to run a
> mapreduce each night to compute how much space/ops is used for each
> customer. Then, customers using lots of space would be billed. Given
> that, as you say, most customers use very little resources, you should
> only need to bill your top customers specially.
>
> The alternative would be for you to work out a special contract as a
> Premier Account, so that all of these apps were billed to your Premier
> Account instead of to the customer:
> http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/premier/index.html
>
> On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 4:42 AM, Daniel Florey  wrote:
> > Hi Emlyn,
> > running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:
> > - Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions
> > (=access to the datastore) by themselves
> > - The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the
> > customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources 
> consumed
> > when using a multi-tenancy app
> > You plugin concept sounds very interesting and is a good idea! In our 
> case
> > we are the only app running on app engine in 99% of the cases. Once GAE 
> is
> > more widely adopted this would be very interesting.
> >
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> > To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> > google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
> >
>
>

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Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Joshua Smith

On Nov 9, 2011, at 7:42 AM, Daniel Florey wrote:

> running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:
> - Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions 
> (=access to the datastore) by themselves

I suspect that this desire would be gated by cost. That is, for customers who 
want to do this, they pay $15/month ($9 to google + your fee). For customer who 
can live without this control, you offer them a cheaper version that doesn't 
have this ability (the multi-tenant version).

> - The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the 
> customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources consumed 
> when using a multi-tenancy app

If it were simple, you wouldn't have a business. :)

Seriously, though, you could easily apply caps on the user's settings or usage 
when they opt in to the multi-tenant version, and if they need to exceed those, 
they bump up to the private $15/month (minimum) version.

-Joshua

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Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Jon McAlister
Are there other reasons holding you back? I ask because the two you
have listed could both be overcome. The simplest design I could
imagine would be for you to code your own authorization and accounting
system within your app. It would take some work, but would presumably
pay for itself in terms of keeping your customers and also gaining new
customers. That is, the app would accept login from all Google
accounts, but then your code checks the accounts against ACLs
maintained by the app itself. You'd need to also write an admin page
to allow the customer to add or remove folks from the ACL, but this is
also somewhat better because now you could control the UI here. In
terms of accounting, one simple solution would be for you to run a
mapreduce each night to compute how much space/ops is used for each
customer. Then, customers using lots of space would be billed. Given
that, as you say, most customers use very little resources, you should
only need to bill your top customers specially.

The alternative would be for you to work out a special contract as a
Premier Account, so that all of these apps were billed to your Premier
Account instead of to the customer:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/premier/index.html

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 4:42 AM, Daniel Florey  wrote:
> Hi Emlyn,
> running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:
> - Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions
> (=access to the datastore) by themselves
> - The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the
> customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources consumed
> when using a multi-tenancy app
> You plugin concept sounds very interesting and is a good idea! In our case
> we are the only app running on app engine in 99% of the cases. Once GAE is
> more widely adopted this would be very interesting.
>
> --
> 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/-/UKr8tzjcJgEJ.
> 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.
>

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Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Daniel Florey
Hi Emlyn,
running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:
- Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions 
(=access to the datastore) by themselves
- The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the 
customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources 
consumed when using a multi-tenancy app

You plugin concept sounds very interesting and is a good idea! In our case 
we are the only app running on app engine in 99% of the cases. Once GAE is 
more widely adopted this would be very interesting.

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Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Emlyn
You know what'd be cool (and forgive me if this already exists)? An
app framework that could load custom "plugin" modules, so one
AppEngine app could run multiple back end style tasks at the same
time, from different developers. Then a customer could pay their
$9/month for the app, and plug in as many modules as required. Lots of
commercial apps have a model similar to the OP (sell a lot of times,
very cheaply, to many many customers) and are being affected by the
$9/month minimum, so something like this would let them be pooled
together.

On 9 November 2011 21:57, Emlyn  wrote:
> Would it be cheaper to run it as a single multitenancy app?
>
> On 9 November 2011 20:35, Daniel Florey  wrote:
>> Hi,
>> we are running a tool on App Engine that allows users to sync GMail contacts
>> between different Google / Google Apps accounts.
>> https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=2083+12830481423215493060
>>
>> We make a dedicated deploy to app engine for each customer (company) so that
>> each client has full control over the datastore permissions etc.
>> Right now we have ~2000 instances running on GAE. A lot of these companies
>> switched to Google Apps after evaluating our tool that gives them missing
>> core functionality.
>>
>> Each client pays between 50€ (small enterprises) and 200€ (large
>> enterprises) for our tool and is also in charge for handling the app engine
>> costs.
>> Most of the small businesses (non-profits or enterprises with very few
>> people) have been able to run the app within the free quota.
>> When exceeding the quota they have been charged a few cents per day on top
>> for the resources consumed.
>> After the price change I received hundreds of support requests / complaints
>> in the last two days because people where running out of quota as the apps
>> have been shut down.
>> Our clients may be willing to pay the additional resources required, but
>> most of them will not be able to pay $9 / month which by far exceeds the
>> costs of our tool.
>> This would increase the total cost from 50€/year to at least 150€/year for
>> even the smallest companies.
>> So what killing our business is not the new quota (we have spent a lot of
>> effort to optimize the resources consumption with good results) it is the
>> minimum fee of $9 / month.
>> Any ideas how to handle this?
>> Thanks,
>> Daniel
>>
>> --
>> 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/-/thg1JWk6R7kJ.
>> 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.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Emlyn
>
> http://my.syyn.cc - Synchonise Google+, Facebook, WordPress and Google
> Buzz posts,
> comments and all.
> http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog
> Find me on Facebook and Buzz
>



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Buzz posts,
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Re: [google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Emlyn
Would it be cheaper to run it as a single multitenancy app?

On 9 November 2011 20:35, Daniel Florey  wrote:
> Hi,
> we are running a tool on App Engine that allows users to sync GMail contacts
> between different Google / Google Apps accounts.
> https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=2083+12830481423215493060
>
> We make a dedicated deploy to app engine for each customer (company) so that
> each client has full control over the datastore permissions etc.
> Right now we have ~2000 instances running on GAE. A lot of these companies
> switched to Google Apps after evaluating our tool that gives them missing
> core functionality.
>
> Each client pays between 50€ (small enterprises) and 200€ (large
> enterprises) for our tool and is also in charge for handling the app engine
> costs.
> Most of the small businesses (non-profits or enterprises with very few
> people) have been able to run the app within the free quota.
> When exceeding the quota they have been charged a few cents per day on top
> for the resources consumed.
> After the price change I received hundreds of support requests / complaints
> in the last two days because people where running out of quota as the apps
> have been shut down.
> Our clients may be willing to pay the additional resources required, but
> most of them will not be able to pay $9 / month which by far exceeds the
> costs of our tool.
> This would increase the total cost from 50€/year to at least 150€/year for
> even the smallest companies.
> So what killing our business is not the new quota (we have spent a lot of
> effort to optimize the resources consumption with good results) it is the
> minimum fee of $9 / month.
> Any ideas how to handle this?
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
> --
> 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/-/thg1JWk6R7kJ.
> 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.
>



-- 
Emlyn

http://my.syyn.cc - Synchonise Google+, Facebook, WordPress and Google
Buzz posts,
comments and all.
http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog
Find me on Facebook and Buzz

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[google-appengine] Feedback on the new pricing

2011-11-09 Thread Daniel Florey
Hi,
we are running a tool on App Engine that allows users to sync GMail 
contacts between different Google / Google Apps accounts.
https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=2083+12830481423215493060

We make a dedicated deploy to app engine for each customer (company) so 
that each client has full control over the datastore permissions etc.
Right now we have ~2000 instances running on GAE. A lot of these companies 
switched to Google Apps after evaluating our tool that gives them missing 
core functionality.

Each client pays between 50€ (small enterprises) and 200€ (large 
enterprises) for our tool and is also in charge for handling the app engine 
costs.

Most of the small businesses (non-profits or enterprises with very few 
people) have been able to run the app within the free quota. 
When exceeding the quota they have been charged a few cents per day on top 
for the resources consumed.

After the price change I received hundreds of support requests / complaints 
in the last two days because people where running out of quota as the apps 
have been shut down.
Our clients may be willing to pay the additional resources required, but 
most of them will not be able to pay $9 / month which by far exceeds the 
costs of our tool.
This would increase the total cost from 50€/year to at least 150€/year for 
even the smallest companies.

So what killing our business is not the new quota (we have spent a lot of 
effort to optimize the resources consumption with good results) it is the 
minimum fee of $9 / month.

Any ideas how to handle this?

Thanks,

Daniel

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