Could I pay my GAE hosting fee from AdSense revenue?

[Gabor Lenard]

Hi all,

I am late to the party. I have a daily job and I just started working on a simple app in my spare time as a hobby project: people can create topics, add comments and vote. I'm doing my best to optimize it for the hosting fee.

My wishful thinking was that I develop this simple app, enjoy it with my family and friends, and let anyone else use it. If some day it becomes popular, no problem, it will be scaled automatically, and I will include some ads, probably AdSense, which makes the app ugly but I could pay the hosting fee from it. After reading recent posts here from existing GAE app owners and Google employes I am not sure anymore in anything.

Now, my question is quite foolish, because you obviously cannot estimate my hosting fee but is there any chance that I could pay my GAE hosting fee for a really simple application from AdSence revenue (without having to pay a lot of money upfront)?

Or should I just make my app private and hope that the hosting fee will remain reasonable for my family and friends?

Or should I abandon GAE entirely as it is just for enterprises and look for another cloud company?

Thanks,
Gabor

[Tapir]

You can if your adsense revenue is much than your gae app cost.

[Brandon Wirtz]

It depends on what the app does. Your question is like asking "can I pay my
rent singing?" I don't know I haven't heard you sing.

If your app parses the human genome, folds proteins, or searches for ET. No.
You likely can't fund it with Adsense.

If it picks a random pirate name for your Visitors, and always chooses "Pink
Beard the Bold", then yes you can pay for the hosting costs with GAE.

Clearly people were planning for profit businesses on App engine. So, it is
possible.

Hi all,

Thanks,
Gabor

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[John Patterson]

After the new pricing takes effect my AdSense revenue will be about 200x the higher hosting costs.  So yes, it is very possible to pay for your running costs with AdSense and still retain 99% as profit.  If you are starting a new site from zero the only tricky thing is estimating when to start paying the 9 bucks a month to enable scaling or risk having quota error messages shown to your users.

[Anders]

Wow. That's a huge profit margin. I'm using a bootstrapping business strategy using ad revenue. Maybe my worry about the new pricing has been totally overblown. Then marketing costs and things like that will likely be much larger than the cost for running the application on GAE. It's a bit tricky to know what the actual costs and revenues will be without having a lot of traffic yet.

[Brandon Wirtz]

Not really.  Hosting costs in most web companies are less than 1% of the total cost of doing business.  I used to do $1000 a day in adsense on a site that cost $100 a month to host.

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[Anders]

Ok, so the cost for running the application should generally only be a tiny part of the revenue. At least for like an ordinary website. Sounds good, except the competition on the Web is extremely hard. But it's a relief to hear that only ad revenue will be enough in my case. I have heard stories about how ad revenue isn't enough but that was probably for newspaper websites and things like that who have a lot of other costs.

[Brandon Thomson]

I, too, still have a very healthy margin from mostly Adsense revenue after the billing changes.

I am still convinced GAE is a good choice for shoestring budget indie developers like myself if the project fits the platform, but suspect many will choose avoid it due to all the recent noise and uncertainty.