Really Terribly Designed Pricing Page

[Joshua Smith]

I keep going back to this page:

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

and finding it puzzling.  Every time I think I understand the new pricing, I then start to question that understanding again.

First, I've read in lots of places, but NOT ON THIS PAGE, that the $9/app is a MONTHLY charge.  Is that correct?  Why they #$%^& doesn't the page say what time interval the prices cover?  It's like this is the summary printed on the side of the box, but the fine print is someplace else that you forgot to link to.

Second, halfway down the page, you seem to switch from 3 columns to 2 columns in the same table, and I can't tell whether there is any relationship between those top 3 columns and those bottom 2 columns.  I think they have nothing to do with each other, but I'm not sure.

And then halfway to the bottom from there, you suddenly switch from numbers to check boxes.

WTF?  Who designed this -- Microsoft?  Did anybody review it?

Here are some specific questions that this table does not answer:

- In the old model, I had to "enable billing" to bump up some FREE quotas to useful levels.  I believe that OLD("enable billing" ) == NEW("$9/app") and so I'll need to cough up the $9 to get those reasonable quotas.  Is that correct?

- What are the actual free quotas in the new pricing regime?  Are there tables like these: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html for the new pricing?  Those tables don't work since you aren't going to be billing those things anymore.

- I *think* that I can pay $9 per app (per month) or $500 period (per month) and my not-really-FREE-anymore quotas, whatever they might be, are exactly the same, and my per-usage charges are also exactly the same.  So I should go for the $9 plan until I have 56 applications.  Is that correct?

[As you answer this, please understand that I think your SLA and Operational Support claims are completely worthless. SLAs are silly since all they do is require to you waive fees that, if your service is down, I'm not incurring anyway; and the only Operational Support that matters is that you keep the damn data centers running, which you are going to do no matter what.  Giving you $500/month to reply to my emails quicker would be insane.  I understand that large enterprises will often pay large amounts of money for completely nonsensical documents.  I don't work for a company that big.]

- I believe that you now have a gun to my head forcing me to switch to HR from M/S.  Because I'm using Python, and the price of Python is going to skyrocket unless I multi-thread, and I have to use HR to multithread.  Is that correct?  (After all, it's only good manners that when you put a gun to someone's head, you tell them and don't wait for them to connect a bunch of dots to figure it out.  In the movies, this is usually done by clicking off the safety or cocking the trigger.)

I probably have more questions, but let's get started with these.

-Joshua Smith

 Employee of a not-Huge company that uses GAE for about a dozen critical business functions

 Municipal Volunteer who uses GAE for one noble application

[GAEfan]

And, where is the "always on" feature in this list? Is that the
"reserved" instance hours?

Correct me if I am wrong, but the always on gives you 3 instances, but
not necessarily 72 instance hours per day. If your app averages 2
instances all day, then spikes to 10 for an hour, you would be charged
for 7 more instance hours. The extra 23 unused instance hours you
reserved are wasted.

And, please explain the Datastore tabulations shown in the billing
preview. The numbers for my app seem very high (millions per day?).

And, when I look at the open instances right now, I see an instance
that is more than 2 hours old, but has only served 1 request. Another
is 5 hours old, and only served 6 requests. Seems like a bug that
would result in over billing.

It gets curiouser and curiouser.

[GAEfan]

Update: those instances are still there. One instance is now 3.5
hours old, and served just one request. Another is now 6.5 hours old,
and still has served just 6 requests.

[Geoffrey Spear]

The "always on" feature is being removed, although you can easily replace it by nudging the "minimum idle instances" setting over.

"Reserved instances" are just a commitment to spend a certain amount on instances, but they can all be dynamically allocated.

[Kenneth]

This was posted in another thread and covers most questions:

http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/postpreviewpricing.html

[Joshua Smith]

Actually, that answered exactly 0 of my questions.

(Thanks for the link, though. :)

On Sep 1, 2011, at 1:09 PM, Kenneth wrote:

This was posted in another thread and covers most questions:

http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/postpreviewpricing.html

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[nickmilon]

@GAEfun I bet you got to change your nickname pretty soon, as I have
to say sorry to my blog readers :-(
http://gaengine.blogspot.com


On Sep 1, 6:37 pm, GAEfan <ken...@gmail.com> wrote:o

[Raymond C.]

I used to recommend every developers around to use GAE because its the best cloud platform by design.  Now i truly feel sorry to all of them and telling them I am quitting all Google's product.

[Angke Chen]

Yeah I'm moving away as well to node.js on AWS.

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