Feedback on the new pricing

[Daniel Florey]

Hi,

we are running a tool on App Engine that allows users to sync GMail contacts between different Google / Google Apps accounts.

https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=2083+12830481423215493060

We make a dedicated deploy to app engine for each customer (company) so that each client has full control over the datastore permissions etc.

Right now we have ~2000 instances running on GAE. A lot of these companies switched to Google Apps after evaluating our tool that gives them missing core functionality.

Each client pays between 50€ (small enterprises) and 200€ (large enterprises) for our tool and is also in charge for handling the app engine costs.

Most of the small businesses (non-profits or enterprises with very few people) have been able to run the app within the free quota. 

When exceeding the quota they have been charged a few cents per day on top for the resources consumed.

After the price change I received hundreds of support requests / complaints in the last two days because people where running out of quota as the apps have been shut down.

Our clients may be willing to pay the additional resources required, but most of them will not be able to pay $9 / month which by far exceeds the costs of our tool.

This would increase the total cost from 50€/year to at least 150€/year for even the smallest companies.

So what killing our business is not the new quota (we have spent a lot of effort to optimize the resources consumption with good results) it is the minimum fee of $9 / month.

Any ideas how to handle this?

Thanks,

Daniel

[Emlyn]

Would it be cheaper to run it as a single multitenancy app?

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[Emlyn]

You know what'd be cool (and forgive me if this already exists)? An
app framework that could load custom "plugin" modules, so one
AppEngine app could run multiple back end style tasks at the same
time, from different developers. Then a customer could pay their
$9/month for the app, and plug in as many modules as required. Lots of
commercial apps have a model similar to the OP (sell a lot of times,
very cheaply, to many many customers) and are being affected by the
$9/month minimum, so something like this would let them be pooled
together.

[Daniel Florey]

Hi Emlyn,

running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:

- Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions (=access to the datastore) by themselves

- The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources consumed when using a multi-tenancy app

You plugin concept sounds very interesting and is a good idea! In our case we are the only app running on app engine in 99% of the cases. Once GAE is more widely adopted this would be very interesting.

[Jon McAlister]

Are there other reasons holding you back? I ask because the two you
have listed could both be overcome. The simplest design I could
imagine would be for you to code your own authorization and accounting
system within your app. It would take some work, but would presumably
pay for itself in terms of keeping your customers and also gaining new
customers. That is, the app would accept login from all Google
accounts, but then your code checks the accounts against ACLs
maintained by the app itself. You'd need to also write an admin page
to allow the customer to add or remove folks from the ACL, but this is
also somewhat better because now you could control the UI here. In
terms of accounting, one simple solution would be for you to run a
mapreduce each night to compute how much space/ops is used for each
customer. Then, customers using lots of space would be billed. Given
that, as you say, most customers use very little resources, you should
only need to bill your top customers specially.

The alternative would be for you to work out a special contract as a
Premier Account, so that all of these apps were billed to your Premier
Account instead of to the customer:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/premier/index.html

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[Joshua Smith]

On Nov 9, 2011, at 7:42 AM, Daniel Florey wrote:

running as a multi-tenancy app is not doable for several reasons:

- Clients want to be able to protect the data by managing the permissions (=access to the datastore) by themselves

I suspect that this desire would be gated by cost. That is, for customers who want to do this, they pay $15/month ($9 to google + your fee). For customer who can live without this control, you offer them a cheaper version that doesn't have this ability (the multi-tenant version).

- The app can use a lot of resources depending on the settings of the customer. I don't see a simply way to charge them for the resources consumed when using a multi-tenancy app

If it were simple, you wouldn't have a business. :)

Seriously, though, you could easily apply caps on the user's settings or usage when they opt in to the multi-tenant version, and if they need to exceed those, they bump up to the private $15/month (minimum) version.

-Joshua

[Daniel Florey]

Thanks for your input!

Well, the main reason why I came up with the approach to deploy applications to each customer mainly was because of the AuthSub restriction that each app could only be restricted to one Google Apps domain.

This was the only way to allow users to login with a Google Apps account and grant access to their contacts data.

A lot has changed since the initial version (OpenID/OAuth support etc.) and since the most recent versions of the SDK I'm confident that it the task queues will allow to handle thousands of concurrent tasks/users. 

This has been another showstopper for us as we have to run thousands of long living background tasks in parallel.

However I'd of course prefer to put all apps under a premium account but as far as I understand it will not be possible to add all applications that I own as a developer - only the once that are added to our own Google Apps domain as a service?

Or am I wrong?

This would be very good news indeed as this would resolve the 9$/month minimum fee.

Daniel

[leduongcom]

Hi!

- Old price: Only $15/month....

GAE has been update new price!
- :| my app must pay $24/day => $720/month

OMG!!! too expensive... Google is right or wrong...