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Comment by gte910h | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if google is just trying to encourage an architecture which is less bad for their site.

I'm guessing a small minority of apps were doing things in a way that was eating up tons more resources than they were paying for. I bet for many apps, this could end up no worse or better.

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I don't think it's a small minority of apps. 100% of the people I know who are using GAE are seeing the minimum of a 4x price increase for their app (before the 50% discount). The price increase would actually prevent some small ISVs from reaching ramen profitability. There's a thread somewhere on the GAE google groups containing many angry users.

Even if most of my apps would increase by 10x they would still be cheaper than running a single AWS instance for them. Not even taking into account the easy of management and automatic redundancy that GAE offers.

I seriously doubt that. One AWS instance can run multiple instances of your web app. On GAE you're going to pay about $40/month for each of those instances!

As Wesley Chung noted in his reply on the GAE mailing list, GAE is designed for companies who get very unpredictable traffic. If you get a very predictable traffic, it's significantly cheaper hosting on AWS. Some of my apps previously cost $40 a month, now cost almost $300 per month. I can definitely run these apps on Linode for a fraction of the cost.

I picked GAE mainly because it was fast to setup, but I could have equally chosen Heroku over app engine when I first built it. In hindsight, I wish I had.

I'm seeing a 50x (5000%) $ increase and I wrote my app from scratch "by the GAE book". It almost seems as if those of us who put the effort in to do it the GAE way are worse off than those who just uploaded django.

I wrote an app from scratch for GAE. Its cost is increasing 5000%. In fact the increase seems more than people who just slapped django on it.

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