Lou Franco's ECM Imaging Blog

Google put up a sneak preview of their expected pricing for App Engine.

You'll be able to buy capacity based on a daily budget for your app, similar to the way AdWords spending works. You'll have fine-grained control over this daily budget so you can apply it across CPU, network bandwidth, disk storage, and email as you see fit. You'll only pay for the resources your app actually uses, not to exceed the budget you set.

It's pretty much what you'd expect given the precedent set by Amazon. Cloud services are something we pay for.

Even though I was expecting this, there was a part of me that was hoping Google would find another way to deliver these services. It comes from this line of thinking:

1. There are a bunch of companies offering free services on the web 
2. Some of them get really popular
3. Presumably this means they need more server power, which most seem to pay for with VC money.
   
4. Then they get bought and someone gives them a load of money and pays for all their future operations costs.

The problem is that this is a lottery -- you only recoup your expenses if Google buys you. What would be nice is if Google could figure out a way to get you money proportional to your success.

The interesting thing is that this problem has been solved recently. Apple's AppStore provides developers with everything they need to start a business around their app. They handle some level of marketing, fulfillment, notification and delivery of updates, etc, and they take a cut of sale. If you make an app that gets 10 sales a day, you get 10 sales worth of money. It's not much, but you can grow from there -- you have some basis for investing in promotion.

What Google needs is a payments system for AppEngine -- and a way to pay for cloud services from that -- that way moderately successful web applications can provide proportional returns to their developers. I see that Google Checkout can be tied into the App Engine, which is great -- but Checkout doesn't support recurring payments, so it's pretty useless for this -- you can use PayPal, but it seems a natural to want Ad buys, Ad hosting revenue, and payments to all come in and out of the same pot.

Of course, Amazon already has this, but for sheer idea to deployment, the App Engine is amazing -- and it's tuned for these simple for-pay web services that 37 Signals keeps telling everybody to build. Without recurring payments, though, you just that much more friction to building your app, when the App Engine approach makes everything else so easy.