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Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

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Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#61

Post by humbledrone »

igorgue wrote: post #48
thematt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote software that many people found useful and gave it away for free. That's awfully damn generous as far as I'm concerned. You see an improvement that can be made? Then make it. But stop complaining.

I don't want to sound like a troll... but you're better off re-writing the whole thing... I mean look at it. https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed/blob/master/plusf... Global variables galore, tabs no spaces, no documentation, compares to empty not just once but multiple times, pokemon style exception handling (you gotta catch them all!), 'is not None' lol, type checking instead of duck typing... Just to name a…

You realize that you're looking at a 399 line script, right? A couple of globals are perfectly reasonable at that scale.

Also note that checking for "x is not None" is the recommended, idiomatic Python style (see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ for reference).

More importantly, the script works, and was apparently used by quite a few people. Rewriting something that is already known to work, just because you don't like its style, is generally a bad idea.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#63

Post by andymoe »

jcheng wrote: post #35
Smrchy wrote: post #25

I love using GAE and got 8 apps running currently. At first the new pricing model shocked me. But please take a 2nd look. Sure it's more expensive than the old model. But you can set the maximum number of idle instances in your Application Settings page. Just set it down so no more that X instances get spun up: > The Idle Instances slider allows you to control the number of idle instances available to your applicatio…

Thanks for the info. Is there a setting for max number of simultaneous instances? If your app gets slashdotted are your potential costs completely unbounded? (Just out of curiosity, I'm not a GAE customer)

Yes, there is.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#64

Post by vessenes »

cHalgan wrote: post #49

My understanding of all these GAE pricing story is that Google decided that GAE is not a strategic business and that business unit need to break even or they will be canceled. Does this make sense?

Nope, Google doesn't work that way. No business units get P&L's, it's part of their overall financial strategy.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#65

Post by vessenes »

davisml wrote: post #62

It appears that the chart is being misinterpreted. The cost per hour is less under the new pricing and I believe the total hours is calculated for the month.

Agreed. The number of instance hours is vastly different on the two charts; the price seems to be going from .10 / hr to .08 per hour (currently .04).

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#66

Post by wavephorm »

jonknee wrote: post #50
wavephorm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make no money on those products. They can't charge money for their products because they are half-assed knockoffs that nobody will pay anything for.

They make a ton of money on those products. It's all part of the ecosystem. Android users use Google search. So do Chrome users. Analytics users use AdWords (get too many hits with Analytics and you need to start spending some sweet AdWords bucks). YouTube and Gmail users see ads (Google Apps business users pay money directly).

Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality.

Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other than search ads, and even that is going down the tube. Sure, maybe their shareholders have been fooled, but the paying consumer hasn't. Whether they admit it not, Google is in severe trouble if search advertising decreases even a few percent.

Everyone seems to have a crush on Google, but they are going to get fucked pretty badly long term unless they find some alternative, major, multi-billion dollar sources of revenue of which they've found zero so far. Self-driving cars maybe?

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#67

Post by georgemcbay »

andymoe wrote: post #60

An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases. (Which they told us were coming by the way) And by the time the pricing takes effect the updated python runtime should bring costs down even more. The instance costs are comperable to Heroku AND you get a high availability data store AND the ability to store really huge amounts of data in the blobstore AND a CDN fo…

"An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases."

This depends a lot on what you're doing. GAE is now pretty terrible if you're using it for high-bandwidth applications (say, a data proxy or similar). Especially when you compare it to other providers for whom bandwidth prices have been dropping (AWS, Linode, etc now offer incoming bandwidth totally free and the rates on outgoing are very low as well). If you're using it as a number-crunching backend with relatively small in/out datasets, the new prices aren't too bad at all.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#68

Post by nir »

I think Google just doesn't really get how unique GAE was. It was a fantastic platform for small apps, and inevitable some percentage of these would grow to big, paying apps.

Also (sorry for the armchair quarterbacking here, can't resist..) it was exactly what Google can do better than anyone - best server infrastructure + Guido Van Rossums - while stuff like Google+ is exactly what Google haven't a clue how to do.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#69

Post by jonknee »

wavephorm wrote: post #66
jonknee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a ton of money on those products. It's all part of the ecosystem. Android users use Google search. So do Chrome users. Analytics users use AdWords (get too many hits with Analytics and you need to start spending some sweet AdWords bucks). YouTube and Gmail users see ads (Google Apps business users pay money directly).

Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality. Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other tha…

Those products bolster search advertising... That's the point. Android produces a ton of search revenue. So does Chrome.

> Android is a junk iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold.

It's the most popular smartphone OS... Is Linux free as well because it can't be sold? Your blind hatred of Google is bizarre.

Re: Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed

#70

Post by bane »

In my mind, the problem is not so much the extreme pricing difference, but the change in what's being measured, so not only is there a price increase, but it's nearly impossible to figure out how to compare the old vs. new schemes vs. competitors.

The huge price jump is a serious problem, but the weird metrics switch makes it feel like such a bait and switch. I'm going to be highly surprised if this isn't challenged in court.

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