On Monday, April 8, 2013 3:01:24 PM UTC-5, Chad Vincent wrote: > > You're going to have to take all your billable actions, log them to the > datastore, and build a reporting framework. For datastore calls and email > and such, this should be easy enough. I'm not sure if that would be > possible for instance time, though. (Maybe with a Filter, and log the > total amount of time each request takes internally?) > > +1. Also, different actions have radically different costs; one user's actions may only incur some Memcache/Task Queue/Logging operations, which are free or relatively cheap, and another user may be searching the datastore, which can quickly add up in costs.
My suggestion? AppEngine implements the response header X-AppEngine-Estimated-CPM-US-Dollars, which is an estimate of the cost of a particular request times 1000 (Documentation: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/runtime#Responses ). This header is only available while you're logged in as an administrator. So go browse your site, and build up a list of costs: what each page view costs you. For example, maybe your home page only requires some memcache data retrieval, so it should be charged very cheaply. But perhaps your search page makes multiple calls to the datastore, so you charge more for using that page. Then you need to record which pages your customers visit, and bill accordingly. One side note: It may be easier on an administrative basis to charge your users a flat fee instead of going through this hassle. Flat fees are easier for users to understand, and they help reduce support issues (witness the many cellphone horror stories where people accidentally go over their minutes/text message quota and get hit with huge fees, nobody likes those). Also, flat fees save you from writing billing systems and allow you to concentrate on adding new features, which is presumably why your users are paying you in the first place. ----------------- -Vinny P Technology & Media Advisor Chicago, IL @GOV on AppDotNet: https://alpha.app.net/gov -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
