"Minimum per-application charge" - WTF?

[Danny Tuppeny]

I just looked in the Billing History to see what it'll cost me to keep
my applications on App Engine... I saw this text:

> * Note this total does not take into account the minimum per-application charge in the new pricing model.

The link goes to here:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html

However on this page, I cannot find any information on a "minimum per-
application charge". Am I missing something? How can there be a
minimum charge that isn't detailed anywhere on the pricing page? :/

The text in the Billing History page makes it sound like there can't
possibly be free applications anymore, yet the pricing page still has
a "Free" column.

[Barry Hunter]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Danny Tuppeny <da...@tuppeny.com> wrote:
> I just looked in the Billing History to see what it'll cost me to keep
> my applications on App Engine... I saw this text:
>
>> * Note this total does not take into account the minimum per-application charge in the new pricing model.
>
> The link goes to here:
>
> http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html
>
> However on this page, I cannot find any information on a "minimum per-
> application charge". Am I missing something? How can there be a
> minimum charge that isn't detailed anywhere on the pricing page? :/

Its been said in other thread that the "Platform fee" has been changed
to a minimum spend.

So if you enable billing, you will have to pay at least $9 even if you
dont use all of that.

Its a monthly minimum, rather than daily, which is probably why the
history cant really take it into account

>
> The text in the Billing History page makes it sound like there can't
> possibly be free applications anymore, yet the pricing page still has
> a "Free" column.

If all your 'used' columns are below the numbers in the "Free" column,
(ie your Billable column is 0) then you could exist totally with a
free app.

>
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[Danny Tuppeny]

On 1 Sep 2011, at 18:01, Barry Hunter <barryb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Its been said in other thread that the "Platform fee" has been changed
> to a minimum spend.
>
> So if you enable billing, you will have to pay at least $9 even if you
> dont use all of that.

I don't really understand the logic here - if I have an app that uses $3/month of resources, I'm more likely to just not enable billing. That means Google get $0 instead of $3/month. I don't see why this is a better model for anyone :-(

[Vinuth Madinur]

They know you wont do that. Because it means showing a 500 error page for quite a few users. And you would pay extra to avoid that.

--

[Danny Tuppeny]

Well they know wrong :-)

Many people might not, but I'd rather a tiny handful of users see errors than cot me $9/month (especially as most of them are probably bots, which seem to visit my apps as much as humans!).

[Alon (Google)]

Danny and I talked on Google+, but I wanted to update anyone else who
might have the same concerns about keeping your application's Frontend
Instance Hour usage below the free quota.
If you don't want to spin up more than one instance, try setting Min
Pending Request to 15 seconds. That basically tells the scheduler to
prefer to let extra requests wait until the existing instance frees
up.

On Sep 1, 11:05 am, Danny Tuppeny <da...@tuppeny.com> wrote:
> Well they know wrong :-)
>
> Many people might not, but I'd rather a tiny handful of users see errors
> than cot me $9/month (especially as most of them are probably bots, which
> seem to visit my apps as much as humans!).
>

> On 1 September 2011 18:38, Vinuth Madinur <vinuth.madi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > They know you wont do that. Because it means showing a 500 error page for
> > quite a few users. And you would pay extra to avoid that.
>
> > On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Danny Tuppeny <da...@tuppeny.com> wrote:
>

[Bay]

That doesn't work. I have min. idle instances set to 1 and time before spinning up a new instance set to 15s. Even though my app never has latencies above 15s there is still more or less always between 2-3 instances running. Meaning around a charge of 600 USD pr year.

This is insane.

[Francois Masurel]

Yep, there still seem to be some issues with the scheduler.

You might want to star this issue :

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=5414 GAE doesn't seem to take "Min Pending Latency" into account

Francois

[Frank]

That does not work either for me. I still have 3 instances even though I had 10 requests and each is under 100 ms. The scheduler is not working as advertised. We are at the mercy of the scheduler for pricing, and we can't even rely on it to make pricing optimizations. Seriously, the engineers are not delivering on a critical feature which the product is banking on for pricing.

Google you can do better. Only if you had the will...

[Bay]

Thx francois. It's still very concerning that this issue has not been fixes even though it's been acknowledged for more than a month.

This is not the likes of the super-premium service that the team is saying they are aiming at...