No reply from Google support concerning pricing

[Felix E. Klee]

On 2012-02-25 and 03-09 CET, I sent emails to:

appengine_up...@google.com

So far no reply. Any suggestion whom else to contact with specific
questions concerning pricing?

Cases such as this make me wonder if Google is perhaps not taking App
Engine serious anymore. Wonder when they will shut it down like so
many other recent services...

[Stefano Ciccarelli]

You remembered me that I sent a mail to that address a couple of months ago without response...

2012/3/19 Felix E. Klee <felix...@inka.de>

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Nel mondo esistono 10 categorie di persone, quelle che capiscono il binario e quelle che non lo capiscono.

[Felix E. Klee]

Still waiting for a reply. It's now over a month that I sent my
original inquiry.

Anyone from Google willing to have a look at the issue?

[Brandon Wirtz]

Pricing is on the website. If you want to know the cost to run an app you
built, build a skeleton that simulates the operations you are going to
perform and test.

[Stefano Ciccarelli]

That email address is on the website too.

2012/3/28 Brandon Wirtz <dra...@digerat.com>

Pricing is on the website. If you want to know the cost to run an app you
built, build a skeleton that simulates the operations you are going to
perform and test.

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[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Stefano Ciccarelli
<scicc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That email address is on the website too.

Exactly. Furthermore my question is a very specific one concerning
billing, and it is *not* covered on the website. Well, if they don't
want the money...

I wonder why Google doesn't seem to care about properly supporting App
Engine anymore.

[Jeff Schnitzer]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Felix E. Klee <felix...@inka.de> wrote:
>
> I wonder why Google doesn't seem to care about properly supporting App
> Engine anymore.

FWIW, Google (pick any branch - it doesn't matter) has never been good
about responding to email. This isn't a change, it's just something
you learn to live with if you use Google services. I can't fault them
terribly for this, although it is a weakness. Presumably this is now
something you can fix (for GAE, at least) with a $500/mo Premier
account.

Jeff

[Stefano Ciccarelli]

My question is about Italian VAT, perhaps that was the wrong email address to ask to.

2012/3/28 Felix E. Klee <felix...@inka.de>

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[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:37 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <je...@infohazard.org> wrote:
> Presumably this is now something you can fix (for GAE, at least) with
> a $500/mo Premier account.

Why would I want to give 500 USD/month to a company that doesn't deliver
what it promises?

In fact I have paid for another "Google Premier" service: Apps. Support
was terrible. Don't want the same experience again.

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Felix,

That email address was intended for questions related to the transition into the new pricing model and will be decommissioned soon.  As Jeff stated (accurately), we don't staff any product support up to the point where they can respond to every email from every customer, whether or not that is a mistake can certainly be debated but that is in essence the Google policy.  It is part of the reason we can offer so many free services.  This group is a better place to get answers as other members will sometimes respond and periodically (such as right now) Googlers will respond.  

Now that we have answered the meta-question about the question, what was the actual question?  Asking it here in the first place would likely have saved you some time although I completely acknowledge we do not do a good job of making that clear.

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Gregory D'alesandre <gr...@google.com>
wrote:

> It is part of the reason we can offer so many free services.

Those free services... Just look at my toy projects on App Engine. In
the past they cost only when there was a lot of traffic. Now they cost
ca. 9 USD/month. Each one! At least those projects I would like to
migrate away. But that's a different issue.

> Now that we have answered the meta-question about the question, what
> was the actual question?

It's a question about billing, which became only relevant due to the
switch to the new pricing model. I do not want to discuss the question
in the forum. Otherwise, I would have already done so.

[Gregory D'alesandre]

I've responded to your question through that email address.  As I noted previously, that address will be decommissioned soon.

Greg

[alex]

A plain simple calculation:

Let's say you move one of your apps to Rackspace. I find their pricing more "friendly" than e.g. AWS when you need an instance running 24/7. So, you'll end up paying a little more than 20$ just for a "512 MB Linux Server Instance". I'm not counting a load balancer, DB backend, memcache, maintenance, monitoring and other costs associated  with the whole thing here. AWS would charge you even more.

A "512 MB Linux Server Instance" is not enough in 99% of the cases (unless this is a "I made it only for myself" app)

9 USD/month sound like a very much reasonable price to me, considering it includes all I described above (much more actually) .

They say there are 1M+ apps running on GAE. Well, let's just take a half of that. It's 500k apps x 9 USD, about 5M USD Google would give up each month just because, you know, it's cool to offer 100% free service? The fact that Google charges those money kinda makes me feel they do care about GAE and it's future as a public PaaS.

Please, correct me if I'm too far from the reality in those numbers.

[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 6:55 PM, alex <al...@cloudware.it> wrote:
> Let's say you move one of your apps to Rackspace.

A Rackspace instance is not interesting to me. I would use another
service where I'm primarily billed per resources and where I don't have
to think about maintenance. Preferably it's a service with an open
architecture, to avoid vendor login. Many years ago, I was using
EscapeBox.net, a BSD based service somewhere in between Google App
Engine and AWS. It's not available anymore.

Anyway, currently I'm still using the 50 USD equivalent credit that
Google assigned to each app during the transition period. However, when
that credit expires, then my costs will go up from something like

1 USD (for the occasional over-quota)

to

70 to 90 USD

per month! And more, if I add more apps.

Of course I could downgrade apps to free quota only, but then these apps
will be unreachable in important moments. That may for example be during
a demonstration, or after someone mentioned one of my apps on Twitter.

In a nutshell: With the new pricing model App Engine loses a lot of
appeal to me.

Google should not forget that toy projects are important:

* They may go commercial.

* They sharpen the developer's skills.

* They are used to show the developer's customers how cool App Engine
is, by proof of concept.

* They help create a fan base.

[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 6:42 PM, Gregory D'alesandre <gr...@google.com>
wrote:

> I've responded to your question through that email address.

Thank you!

[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 6:55 PM, alex <al...@cloudware.it> wrote:

> It's 500k apps x 9 USD, about 5M USD Google would give up each month
> just

That calculation is flawed. There are many applications using resources
priced *above* that *minimum charge*.

I think Google risks losing something more important than a couple of
small scale apps penalized by those 9 USD. They risk losing enthusiastic
developers.

> because, you know, it's cool to offer 100% free service?

Never did I ask for free service. In fact it would be OK for me to not
have a free quota option at all, just one without minimum charge.

[alex]

Here you go:

http://upon2020.com/2011/04/the-ever-growing-list-of-paas-companies-and-paas-projects/

[Felix E. Klee]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 8:15 PM, alex <al...@cloudware.it> wrote:
> http://upon2020.com/2011/04/the-ever-growing-list-of-paas-companies-and-paas-projects/

Thanks for the pointer!

[Alexander Botov]

Hi Greg, 

If you allow me, I have a suggestion. Why don't you guys assign person from GAE team to respond regularly to this group? We need feedback at least of what's going on in case of a problem, ignorance is the worst feedback. After all it's all about people, not software. We need your attention, please +1 us! :)

Best Regards,

--alex

28 март 2012, сряда 18:48:33 UTC+3, Greg D'Alesandre написа:

Hi Felix,

That email address was intended for questions related to the transition into the new pricing model and will be decommissioned soon.  As Jeff stated (accurately), we don't staff any product support up to the point where they can respond to every email from every customer, whether or not that is a mistake can certainly be debated but that is in essence the Google policy.  It is part of the reason we can offer so many free services.  This group is a better place to get answers as other members will sometimes respond and periodically (such as right now) Googlers will respond.  

Now that we have answered the meta-question about the question, what was the actual question?  Asking it here in the first place would likely have saved you some time although I completely acknowledge we do not do a good job of making that clear.

Greg D'Alesandre

Senior Product Manager, Google App Engine

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Felix E. Klee <felix...@inka.de> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:37 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <je...@infohazard.org> wrote:
> Presumably this is now something you can fix (for GAE, at least) with
> a $500/mo Premier account.

Why would I want to give 500 USD/month to a company that doesn't deliver
what it promises?

In fact I have paid for another "Google Premier" service: Apps. Support
was terrible. Don't want the same experience again.

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[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi Alex,

We have a number of people who respond in the group, but they don't respond to every single message.  When there are outages we typically respond in the group but those responses are often hard to find due to the numerous other emails in the group (this is an issue we need to find a way to resolve).  I had a relatively long post about this a little while ago, the issue is that there are a lot of developers who are using a free product and want immediate responses to every issue they see.  While we are happy to help, responding to every message would mean we can't do anything else.  We created Premier Accounts as a way for a business that wants a guaranteed response to be able to get it by essentially paying a portion of the cost of that person ($500/month).  I know that price is steep for some independent developer and so we continue to have Googlers monitor and respond in stackoverflow and the groups.

I hope that helps,

Greg

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[doright]

I've just found this thread.

3 weeks after the OP the same email address still appears on the support page when you have billing questions:

appengine_updated_pricing@google.com

If you're not monitoring this address can't you at least remove this address from the page and tell us what to do there in case of problems?  Surely that would only take 5 minutes and save a whole lot of frustration.

many thanks.