Interested in giving us your thoughts on App Engine?

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hello All,

I'm one of the Product Managers on App Engine at Google.  We are in the process of working on a number of features that you, our users, have been requesting for App Engine but, while this is happening, we wanted to get some additional thoughts and feedback!  We've put an anonymous survey together, it is purely voluntary but the information from it will help us make decisions about the future of App Engine.  

Survey: https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/viewform?authkey=COPt99sL&hl=en&formkey=dG5fTVlnS3lvSWZNMkdGYkRqcmRSRmc6MQ#gid=0 

Thank you all in advance for your time and thoughts!

Greg Dalesandre

Product Manager, Google App Engine

Privacy disclosure: Survey data will be handled in accordance with Google's Privacy Policy <http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/privacy-policy.html>. Your email address will not be collected and will not be associated with your survey answers

[James Broberg]

I'd recommend any/all app developers to go over and have look. I don't
want to get all worked up on something that hasn't happened yet but
some of the price points mooted in this survey are positively eye
watering. I'm happy to put my name to the feedback I left and I'd be
curious to see what others think.

------------------
Honestly, the types of prices you are flagging here are pretty
concerning, even at the low end, and I can see it becoming
uneconomical very quickly once you add a few of these services on to
your account. I'd expect a substantial improvement in performance to
go along with these prices.

It moves well away from the metered billing approach that is used now.
At the very least I'd like to see some packaging of these advanced
capabilities at a discount instead of getting nickeled and dimed for
them individually.

As a GAE/J dev, it would lead me to seriously consider porting my app
to EC2/Beanstalk or other alternatives. When it is more cost effective
to run 4-5 instances 24/7 on EC2 (even if they are idle half the time)
than run my app on GAE then your doing it wrong.
------------------

-James

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[Gopal Patel]

We expect Google to maintain price steady for as long as feasible,
whatever it is.

Google's pricing is always based on resource usage. Moving towards
"MONTHLY" system is not good.

1) You may have same pricing structure for FULL TEXT because the
resource usage going to increase anyway ( with extra index scan and
all ) and total billing is going to increase. why separate billing ?

2) Same for SQL : CPU usage is going to increase and can be billed.
why separate billing ?

3) For, HTTPS, Google is already charging extra for secure requests.
Why separate billing ?

**Better way to increase profit is to reduce FREE QUOTA for
application.** "Google App Engine" is not public service as Google
Search is. We expect extremely quality ( latency, speed,
availability ) by default from Google ( without paying separately for
it. :P )

> > Survey: https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/viewform?authkey=COPt99s...

[Gopal Patel]

As a side thought, is measuring resource usage itself take too much
resource ? ( what percentage of cpu used by google for measuring
resource usage of each request ? )

[Philip]

How am I supposed to answer a question like:

What is the likelihood that you would sign up for Full-Text Search
(up
to 750K documents) at a price of $125 per month?

If I don't know how much search queries cost and how much it cost to
modify indexed documents?

However, I would strongly recommend a billing system that's similar to
running queries on app engine.

[jeremi joslin]

Hello,

As much as possible I'd like google to continue to bill on usage
instead of flat fee because when starting a startup, it makes it
easier to manage finance.
What I love about app engine now as a bootstrapped company, is that my
infrastructure cost grow at the same pace as my income.

For exemple, the backup, instead of doing 100$ a month (or else) it
would be nice to be x.xx$ per backup Go.

Thanks,
Jeremi

[J]

Presumably most of the services offered here would be optional to
buy?

Document Search and SSL were two features on the survey and /some/ of
the proposed prices were quite reasonable. My company currently offers
SSL for GAE (until Google comes up with theirs) and our prices are in
the middle of the range suggested in the survey. Seeing those
suggested prices wasn't particularly an OMG moment. Frankly, I can't
wait till Google comes up with the service.

The consulting and issue resolution services are another matter. Some
of us make our living by providing that service and I would like to
see Google do more to promote the services that the ecosystem provides
rather than try and take it over.

> > Survey: https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/viewform?authkey=COPt99s...

[Ugorji Nwoke]

I'm very concerned with this new model of flat-rate pricing. I like the resource-based pricing better. That has always been a hallmark of App Engine and is the single reason why I am sticking with it. I seriously considered AWS Beanstalk, which tries to give a platform-as-a-service model like app engine, but decided against it because I will still be paying for full EC2 instances whether I need whole ones or not. I think it will be a grave mistake to move to this pricing model. This should be a non-starter, and goes completely against the app engine promise. This survey alone is making me re-consider basing my application on App Engine.

[Geoffrey Spear]

On Friday, February 11, 2011 2:00:09 AM UTC-5, gops wrote:

3) For, HTTPS, Google is already charging extra for secure requests.
Why separate billing ?

For this one, I suspect it would involve giving applications static IP addresses, since TLS/SNI still isn't supported on most browsers on Windows XP, and the installed base of XP machines doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

[bFlood]

this looks to me like the features associated with GAEfB are now being
offered as add-on services to traditional GAE users. If all other
billing in GAE stays the same and we can now add these premium
services piecemeal for a monthly price, that sounds like a big win to
me. The per-user pricing that GAEfB originally had was problematic for
sites that needed to serve both internal and external customers

my two cents...
b

[Jeff Schwartz]

+1

That's my impression also. Personally, I'd appreciate the option of being able to use SQL if it was reasonably priced.

Jeff

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Jeff Schwartz

[Mike]

The backup and restore feature is LONG overdue. Please implement this
as soon as possible. It's one of the few features I would seriously
consider paying a monthly fee for.

On Feb 10, 11:34 pm, "Gregory D'alesandre" <gr...@google.com> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm one of the Product Managers on App Engine at Google.  We are in the
> process of working on a number of features that you, our users, have been
> requesting for App Engine but, while this is happening, we wanted to get
> some additional thoughts and feedback!  We've put an anonymous survey
> together, it is purely voluntary but the information from it will help us
> make decisions about the future of App Engine.
>

> Survey:https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/google.com/viewform?authkey=COPt99s...

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

I don't suspect we'd move away from resource based pricing, but those of you that have accountants breathing down your necks know that the way we bill now is terrible for finance departments that require some ability to do projections, POs, etc. We have to find a solution that works for everyone, so please give us your earnest feedback about what works for you (So in short: blame the accountants). 

Also: be realistic. Many of you are paying very small amounts of money a month for hosting, and we'd like to keep it that way.  For those of you running businesses on App Engine, we need to understand your pricing needs. For instance: we often hear that when there's a problem, there's no support recourse and no way to contact Google. Support doesn't pay for itself, unfortunately, and while we do our best to try to help all of you, the costs just don't scale that way. 

Anyway, I wanted to thank all of you in advance for participating in the survey. This'll help us a lot when we're making decisions!

(P.S. I was just kidding about "blaming the accountants". Be nice)

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

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