I agree, Google is not a charity, but equally I thought they had a vested interest in bringing developers on board using their technologies and APIs.
Here's a suggestion "free" is a quota like the new quota, 24 instance hours etc "enterprise" is like the new paid for system, with easy to bulk-manage instance hours etc and somewhere in between, you introduce a paid for scheme that's more like the old free quota, say: - No more than 10 (5 ? 3 ?) simultaneous instances at any one time - X number of CPU hours per day (rather than instance hours) - higher than "free" limits, if any on database API calls etc but the important thing being that, when your cap is used up for the day, things stop, so we know that we're not going to accidentally run up a huge bill while we're trying things out with a few hundred users, 10s of queries per minute or hour... You could call this "hobbyist" or "personal" or "soho" - put a fixed price on it ($30 / month?), enough to keep out spammers and abusers, but enough to let people do interesting things without busting your systems, enough for there to be a groundswell of people who know enough about GAE that the platform becomes of interest to enterprise (who need a fungible pool of developers to adopt any technology). That way we small guys can still see it as something we can experiment with and maybe handle the odd burst of users, and if we progress beyond that, then we get into the enterprise level billing. The leap at the moment from "free" to "enterprise" is maybe what's underlying people's concerns, surely it's not beyond the skills of Google to introduce some more tiers and find a variety of sweet spots, if only to suck a few of us back in :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
