If you're running production services, you should probably sign up for a paid support package, which have guaranteed response times down to 15 minutes: https://cloud.google.com/support/
Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.
More often than not, what most people want is simply an acknowledgement. They're not seeking a bug bounty. And definitely not the brush-off you just gave the GP: when someone's house is on fire, you don't demand prepayment for the water.
You absolutely do not have to pay us to report a bug, period. The same day this bug was filed, one of my colleagues (pay...@google.com) jumped on the report and started asking questions to determine what was happening.
It seems to me that the GP's complaint is that this process was too slow: too much back-and-forth, too little dedicated attention to get the problem figured out immediately. That's a frustration which is easy to understand.
The point about support contracts was most likely intended to emphasize that if your livelihood depends on a service, you should have an agreement in place that guarantees you can wake up an engineer on the weekend.
the "free tier" of municipal services is actually just a form of socialism!! eek!
I feel little bit bad for them sometimes. They don't seem to have the time to look into problems. It must be quite a boring job for those assigned on the public issues.
Maybe their higher-ups aren't aware of that.
Form my perspective: sometimes when I report a bug it's more so that other users don't waste their time troubleshooting it than to have it fixed immediately.
Maybe sometimes I'm not 100% clear but it is a bit discouraging to have to send follow-up messages on clear-cut issues like these: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1... https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1... (the comment #10 of the former issue was written a bit too quickly don't you think?)
Then there are issues that "work as intended" but that seem like bad product design: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...
Do they really reach a product manager?
Finally there are issues like these ones that are not clear cut but that I can't investigate myself because it requires time and resources (they eventually cost me a few bucks running instances for testing purposes). https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...
You guys have a good product. I think that the promise of not having to manage infrastructure hit a cord with many people. However you do have many bugs to fix to make the platform more stable and (non intentionally) discouraging people from reporting issues will make things improve at a slower rate.
Good luck!