Google apps engine for Business pricing Q

[David Parks]

I’m looking at Google apps engine for Businesses, and in the pricing it says:

Each application costs $8 per user, up to a maximum of $1000, per month.

Can someone explain to me what a “user” is in this context? I can’t find any explanation. Is this just the user that creates the app on appengine.google.com? Meaning $8 allows you to create up to 10 apps + billable usage over the free quota? Or is there no free quota on the business edition?

 

[Eli Jones]

Wait.. I just realized something.  Does this mean that if I am the only user of my App (and all it does it backend processing), I can pay Google $8 a month so the engineers have to respond to any old silly e-mail I send them (Will they have to LOL at my jokes?)?  (AND I get a SLA?  If the pricing stays like this, I'm in!)

Though, for your purposes, David, the FAQ might help to clarify how unclear the pricing is:

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

Mainly (they're still figuring it out):

"You can also use App Engine for Business to build external applications. We’re still working out the details on pricing so stay tuned (but don’t worry, you won’t have to pay per user!).

Note: The prices outlined here are subject to change at any time without notice before release.

Do I have to pay for my application while I’m developing it?

No, your application remains free as long as it is in development. Only when the application has been published and is active do you need to begin paying for it."

At least the stated plan is that you do not need to pay per user while in development.. so that seems nice.

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[Eli Jones]

Ah, I just realized that "as long as it is in development" could just as easily mean, "as long as it is just on your computer and you have not deployed to appengine".

Unless they have some other sort of formal definition for "published" and "active" that doesn't just mean "deployed".. Who knows when or how you start paying.  Anyway, I'm just here for the $8 SLA.. Though, I'm guessing they'll add a minimum user count ;(

[Geoffrey Spear]

My understanding that the the App Engine for Business offering you're
describing is intended for intranet applications, and that the user
count would be the number of users in your Google Apps domain.
There's no "free quota" because the applications aren't free in the
first place. As I understand it there's no quota system at all because
the business model is different than the "pay for what you use" model
in normal App Engine. (Although it may be reasonable to think you'd
still have the limits of the non-billable quotas, maybe at different
levels, to prevent, say, a 1-person "organization" from running some
massive cluster computing application in the cloud for super-cheap...)

Applications intended to be used by users outside your organization
would be billed differently.

[David Parks]

Oh interesting. Maybe I'm mis-understanding google's intention here. I had
hoped to use app-engine to host a generic web-facing site. It seems like a
brilliant platform for that. But perhaps this is not a primary use case
considered by google? Or maybe that's what they mean by "users outside your
org would be billed differently", perhaps the whole concept is still in its
infancy.

But even so, I would be surprised, because a 100 person intranet site
shouldn’t cost a small company $800 to host (surely a typical $40-$100 VPS
on any old hosting provider would be more than sufficient).

Oh well, I guess the marketing execs have some work to do. :)

--

[Robert Kluin]

Hey David,
You can use App Engine for building a generic internet facing site.
App Engine for Business seems to be targeting a different market
segment, businesses running intranet type apps.

Robert

[Jamie H]

From what I have read they definately plan to make app engine for
business available for user facing sites, they simply have not
determined the pricing for that model yet.

On Oct 20, 2:45 pm, Robert Kluin <robert.kl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey David,
>   You can use App Engine for building a generic internet facing site.
> App Engine for Business seems to be targeting a different market
> segment, businesses running intranet type apps.
>
> Robert
>

[suyash singh]

i think if any user use use ir u get $8 for that but in month max is $1000

~*suyash*~

 

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

The pricing is meant to be extremely competitive against "private cloud" offerings by other providers in this space. A $40-$100 VPS does not come with baked-in authentication with Google Apps or a centralized administration, nor does it come with App Engine's APIs. You can certainly build a similar stack that works for you, but in the end, you're paying for a managed solution versus one you manage and build yourself. There's a point at which self-management doesn't scale anymore, and a decent systems administrator certainly wouldn't cost $800. 

As far as pricing goes, you may not personally think it makes sense for your needs, but 10 years ago, none of us probably would have guessed that large enterprises were willing to drop $60+ a month per user for a web based CRM system. 

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

[David Parks]

Point taken. And I can agree that for a large enterprise of say 2000+ people, 12k/yr for a big app is swollowable. Especially if that 12k/yr gets me 10 apps (that point is unclear to me as a user, marketing could clarify it in your messaging).

My point is about the small business running on google apps. The ~130 person business pays the same as the 2000 person enterprise, roughly speaking.  It’s just my 2-cents and maybe some food for thought, but it seems like this pricing model will favor large and push away small.

 

But really, your biggest problem is that your messaging isn’t clear about the use cases that you are targeting. I think someone in marketing could really clean up the messaging so that we can understand the intended use cases better.

 

All suggestions made in good spirit, I love what you’ve created here.

 

Dave

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

I don't disagree about the messaging. We see a lot of confusion from developers. It's something we'll have to clarify as the product gets closer to a public launch. 

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Thanks for the feedback. You're right that the numbers don't work out for you. We'll have to revisit your needs at some point in the future. Be optimistic that GAE4B is not the be-all-end-all product for enterprise customers - we've stated before that it's just a first step towards having more product offerings that will satisfy customers with different needs.

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Maximillian Dornseif <m.dor...@hudora.de> wrote:

On Oct 21, 6:48 pm, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ikai.l+gro...@google.com>

wrote:

> The pricing is meant to be extremely competitive against "private cloud"

> offerings by other providers in this space. [...]

> a decent systems administrator certainly wouldn't cost $800.

I see your point but for my use case it seems more expensive than I
dare to spend. To my understanding pricing will be PER APPLICATION.

1) We are big into Mashups. So we created not ONE application for our
business needs but half a dozen mashed up via http. Unless we merge
them GAEfB will be prohibitively expensive. Merging will be
interesting not only because of Open Source (GPLv3 anyone?)
Application parts. It will reduce maintainability and eat up
programmer time.

2) We are about 80 People on Google Apps. Upgrading our applications
to GAEfB would cost us an additional 46.000 U$ per year. Since every
Google Apps user would result in additional costs of 576 US per year
we would be forced to police our Google Apps domain and aggressively
remove accounts of alumni, warehouse staff and the like. But I think
its VERY Enterprise 1.0 to begin issuing "who REALLY needs, Internet,
Email, a Computer, a telephone, electrical power" queries. Access to
computing and communication resources should be even available to the
cleaning staff. An (expensive) per user pricing makes this impossible.
Especially because the users which would have their accounts revoked
(warehouse workers, cleaning staff, etc.) are only using marginal
amounts of resources.

3) Additional 46.000 U$ per year. We already own servers. We already
manage EC2 and Rackspace servers. And its all to complex and we want
to reduce that. Thats why we like AppEngine. And because in typical
Google style the product is nice but the customer support is barely
existent we would like to pay for better service (and for TLS in our
Domain). But our resource needs are all in all modest. I assume we
could run the dozen Apps we currently run on AppEngine on 10.000 $ of
hardware if we had to buy everything new and want 99 % uptime
(probably even 5000 $ would be enough). If I add the same amount for
networking, power, etc. and amortize it all over tree years. I'm at
around 550 $ for all my Applications and all my users. Factor in
Administration and we are not that far away from the 1000 $ is
demanding max per Month - for a single application.

To conclude:

* For the "Enterprise" with hundreds or thousands of users your
pricing is certainly very aggressive.
* For the SME with 50-100 there seems to be a weak spot but still
acceptable.
* For companies which followed best web-development and deployment
practices and have broken down their technology in many separate
applications the pricing model is very unattractive. At least unless
they are very large and profit from the 1000 U$ cap.
* I actually hate per user pricing because usually results in people
which would need to improve their computer skills most not being
provided with access.

I liked usage based pricing much more. http://bit.ly/cC4MOl

Regards

Maximillian Dornseif