On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Brandon Wirtz <[email protected]> wrote: > > For $9 who would you run instead? How much hosting would that buy you at > DreamHost? Or Amazon Or Rackspace. Same question at $50, and $500
At Amazon, $500 would buy $500 worth of hosting, $50 would buy $50 worth of hosting, and crucially, $5 would buy $5 worth of hosting and $1 would buy $1 worth of hosting. The phrase they like to use is: "Pay for only for what you use. There is no minimum fee... We charge less where our costs are less..." eg. here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing Under the new pricing scheme $1 worth of hosting will cost $9 and $5 worth of hosting will cost $9. $100 worth of hosting will cost $100. Established projects get full value for money and fledgling web startups get overcharged, exactly at the point where they need the most support. The smaller you are the more you are overcharged. Projects who use $5 of resources are only overcharged 2x where as projects who use $1 of resources are overcharged nearly 10x. > Most solutions have sweet spots in pricing, and as one of the larger > consumers of GAE, I should be one of the most irate about the price > increase It is just the opposite. As your project has progressed beyond using $9 worth of resources you get full value for your spend. The $9 minimum does not affect you at all. > Do you think Google Gives Chrome away for free because > they are nice people? They are in it to make money. I don't think people are saying App Engine should be free. They are saying a strategically important group of people to Google - web projects at a critical early stage - would like to pay $5 for $5 worth of resources, just as enterprise users are charged $100 for $100 worth of resources. > But Google isn’t going to make money on a $9 account, to make it work YOU > have to graduate to being a $150, 300, 500, and $5000 a month account. The nature of the automated, shared-resource App Engine service is that Google makes just as much money, percentage wise, from customers who pay $5000/month as $150/month. That also applies to $5 and $1 spends, or at least it would if they were not overcharged 2x and 10x. > (“There is no payment service that will let you bill $.50 a month”) Many times in the past people have said that they would be happy to pre-pay for service to avoid the issue where the CC charge is more than the resources used. People are happy to pay for what they use and keen to reduce Google's costs just as much as their own. > When the NPO’s say they aren’t able to come up with the $9 I feel bad for > them. That's very kind of you, but it's not about charity. Many small projects, for example web startups, are keen to pay for what they use and would be affected by being overcharged up to 10x in the early stages. The fragility of early stage projects is widely understood - people talk about becoming 'ramen profitable', ie. making just enough money to continue by eating MSG flavoured noodles. Larry and Sergey got their start by building servers out of Lego and cork floor tiles and pinching hard drives from other departments. From there they progressed into a garage. It is unnecessary and counter-productive to have a regressive pricing scheme for App Engine, and someone at Google needs to get creative and fix this. Here's a suggestion: Add a checkbox to the billing screen, default on, that disables the SLA. Any self respecting MBA running Important Enterprise Projects is unlikely to opt out of the SLA, and an SLA is useless to a startup spending less the $9/month, thereby preserving the market segmentation of enterprise projects and web projects. -- 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.
