How to sell and support a web app on GAE

[Phinaes Gage]

As a small ISV, I'd like to figure out how to sell my GAE web app (written in Java) and have my customers deploy the app within their domain, pay Google for hosting costs and me for support. What are the options for doing this?

I'd like to be out of the business of billing and resource metering, but I don't see how to do it easily. As I can see it now there are just two options:

1) Deploying a separate instance of my app for each customer. This has the advantage that the customer pays Google directly for the GAE resources used, but seems hard for me to provide upgrades as there are more and more customers.

2) Having my customers add my app to their domain. This seems better, but what is needed on my end and their end to do this? And even then, it's up to me to bill the customer hosting and support fees, so I have to somehow figure out what resources each tenant uses, right?

Any other ideas or thoughts on this?

[Kyle Finley]

I've been thinking about this also.

For option (1) maybe upgrades could be automated. I wonder if the Google Cloud Deployment Manager could be useful here. At the very least, it seems like it should be possible to have user authenticate via oAuth and upload utilizing the deploy command from a VM.

Out of curiosity how are you planning on licensing your app? I was considering something like this:

Cost	Business Type	Revenue	Hosting Type	Support
Free	Non-commercial	0-XXX	Self - Your Option (1)	None
XXX	Commercial	XXX - XXXXX	Manage - Your Option (2)	Paid
XXX	Commercial	XXX - XXXXX	Self - Your Option (1)	Paid

I think AppEngine is an interesting platform for this type of setup/licensing. It essentially allows the customer to get high quality software and hosting at zero initial cost to them and the developer. I believe this to be ideal for small-medium businesses who don't want to pay a system admin.

I'm also interested in hear others ideas and thoughts on this. 

[Phinaes Gage]

Cloud Deployment Manager could help in the future, but the examples are Compute Engine focused, so I'm skeptical it's ready to use with GAE. I think Option 1 may work well initially, but I don't think it will be viable in the long-term because supporting and upgrading more instances will only get harder and harder.

In my case, non-commercial use is not likely, so as of now I'm leaning towards the second row of your table, where all customers are hosted in my application. I found out that customers can still run the app within their domain as described here.

I'm know roughly how many datastore operations my server code needs for various operations, so I think I can do a poor man's estimate of what the hosting costs are and refine it as needed. To keep things simple, I'd like to just charge one monthly support fee and have hosting be included in this, but I think it's going to take some trial and error to figure out if that will work or not.

When you're small you need to tame complexity, and so far Option 2 seems the best to me. It would be great for developers if Google provided tools to bill app customers for resources used and support provided so we didn't have to do that, but they don't seem to, so we have to find another way. Maybe there is a third party that billing can be outsourced to.

[Phinaes Gage]

On a related note, it would be nice if it were easy to deploy to Google Apps Marketplace for exposure, but they require OAuth2 integration, which doesn't come built in to GAE. It looks like it requires digging through this and this, and even then, I don't see any App Engine specific documentation on this. So it seems right now like deploying and selling a GAE web app is harder than it needs to be. Marketplace in general seems kind of Chrome Extension focused, and the documentation and unpolished WebEx video are not very encouraging.

That's why it still seems to me like Option 2 and using AdWords for marketing, plus tools external to Google for licensing, support and subscription management seems like the best option at this point. It's too bad, because it would drive GAE adoption if these tools were provided to lower the barrier for small ISVs.