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Oh, I believe you can pay and get support

What I don't believe is that the support provided by Google is good or sufficient. Based on experiences with paying Google Apps, I'd say it's not.

My question is whether or not you personally have paid google for said support and then not received what was promised?

The potential bad press that Google would get if Khan Academy had daily issues due bad GAE performance I'm sure that would cost them much more than the 500$/month that you're paying. Being big and nice(or cool) I think it gives and edge here.

I've paid over $50,000 a year for Google Maps. I assure you, their support sucks no matter how much you pay them. We pay a small fraction of that for AWS, and Amazon's support is infinitely better.