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Ask HN: AppEngine's New Pricing Is Skyrocketing, Now What?

19 points by thetrumanshow ↗ HN
I have somewhat popular Google gadgets that I host through AppEngine. They make me no money today, in fact they cost me a few bucks a month to host. With Google's pricing changes, I might be looking at an unsustainable $2600/month bill. Besides just making fun of me for being solely reliant on Google infrastructure, any ideas?

Of course, I raise this issue not only to ask for ideas, but also to generally inform people that this might get really painful for a lot of you.

Edit: link.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-app-engine.html

10 comments

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benologist
Find a way to monetize the gadgets. If conventional ads aren't possible then get some analytics on your users and sell the space yourself.
thetrumanshow
Indeed ads aren't possible at all. Google purges gadgets from its gadget directory that wrap any kind of ads.
benologist
How flexible are they on that? Can you make it branded with some company that's sponsoring you for a period of time, or will that get treated the same as a block of regular ads?
thetrumanshow
Yes, I do tend to think that they would be tolerant of sponsorships, but I'm not sure I could find a sponsorship that would make up the difference.
benologist
You might be surprised - crunch the numbers to find out how many people are actually using it, then start emailing any relevant, big blogs, software products, services etc. If you've got enough traffic someone'll bite.
tshtf
Rewrite for a standard LAMP stack and deploy to a service like Amazon AWS or Linode. You'll benefit by this in the future as it will make it significantly easier to switch providers when yours jacks up the price like Google did here.
dminor
Which change(s) in pricing are responsible for the increase?
thetrumanshow
Great question. The biggest change comes from the per-CPU-hour to per-instance-hour transition. My most popular gadget consumes minimal CPU (spent lots of time optimizing this) but uses anywhere from 29-50 instances. Why? Well, to give you an idea, my midday peak traffic is around 160 requests per second.
foobarbazetc
Switch to another provider. 160 req/s for $2600/month is too much.
JoachimSchipper
If req/s is your main problem, have you considered things like data: URIs? It's probably not enough, but...