I really like the new pricing...

[GR]

Surprised to read the subject of this topic?  It's probably not just you.

I think it's telling that you found my subject SHOCKING enough to read it..  Here's my story:

I'm an individual developer who makes decent (but free) apps.  I am proud of what I have built, and learned using Google App Engine.  I'm not rich.  I don't make much money from my apps.  I spend my spare time in the evenings thinking up great ideas and working on them with hopes of making it big one day.  As of today, my projects are mostly App Engine apps.

I don't want to sound bitter, but I can't afford to swallow my new costs and am forced to find an alternative.  I'm not talking about a lot of money -- my bill went from pennies to about 5 bucks per day.... the problem, at least for me, is that I can almost lease a car for that.... that is sickening to me.  Even though my pet projects make me happy -- I simply cannot justify spending $150 a month on them.

Of course we will complain when our prices go up.  In fact, I was expecting it.  What I wasn't expecting was what we got.  I feel like I was taken for a ride... investing hundreds and hundreds of hours pumping my ideas into a shiny engine from Google.  Google makes free stuff -- how could I be so wrong?

[Angke]

I guess we all need to have the balls to say "fuck this shit, I'm out
of here."

I mean, at least 100% percent price increase? Concurrent won't be
ready a few months after the price change?

Quote Eric Cartman: "Screw you guys, I'm going home~"

[GAEfan]

GR,

Are you not able to squeeze each app into the free instance? Make
sure you optimize, using memcache, reducing datastore calls, etc. to
keep each request fast. Also, in your dashboard, you can adjust the
number of instances that are spun up. That will increase the wait
times for your visitors, but may be worth it. Compress js and css
files, sprite images, cache responses.

GAE has taught me a LOT about optimizing.

If, after doing that, you are still getting enough traffic to have to
pay, you probably have enough quality traffic to monetize, helping
defray the costs. Let me know the sites, and I'll see if I can ofer
ideas.

[GR]

Absolutely, I have done all those things.  Like yourself, I have learned a LOT about optimizing.  Memcache is wonderful, and I'm thankful for the Instance tweaks we can do.  I have a lot of traffic -- most of it is coming from users of a free Android app that I made which uses an app engine project as its backend.

The problem with that is that you cannot change an app from free to paid in the Android market, and it's kinda easy to get around 100,000 users of an app... So I'm stuck with a high amount of traffic to my app engine project with no way to start charging for my app.