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by gaeappthrowaway 4336 days ago
I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and $500/mo

There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual tweaking, everything else is automated.

4 comments

Can you talk more about what the app is and what it does? Curious.
I wouldn't be on a throwaway account if I felt comfortable mentioning its name. But, basically, it's an analytics API.
I love App Engine, but why use it in this case? You've got a lot of background processes, but few concurrent users. Couldn't you use a regular server, since you don't have to worry about a spike in traffic?
The API serves nearly 1 billion calls per month, with lots of variations and spikes. That, combined with my lackluster ops skills, makes AppEngine's autoscaling a perfect fit for my use case and skill-level.

Yes, it's probably more expensive than if I used EC2, but I've never been awoken in the middle of the night to need to reboot a server, troubleshoot a memory issue, or scale up my instances.

Sounds good! Congratulations! Can you share a link?
Not comfortable sharing a link in the context of talking about the revenue (hence the throwaway), but it's an analytics API.
Nice. Link, details?