Thanks all for the replies! I'm leaning towards using GAE at this point, with a contingency plan to switch to a third party (most likely AWS) if needed. I do h

Thanks all for the replies! I'm leaning towards using GAE at this point, with a contingency plan to switch to a third party (most likely AWS) if needed. I do hope that the wall that separates App Engine team is high enough and Google has internal controls to prevent anyone from peering into our data. We don't compete with any of Google's core products (search, email and etc). Benefits of GAE are compelling enough for a scrappy startup to use it, even with all the reservations. What attracts us to GAE is: - opportunity to concentrate on the product and not worry about administration - this translates into tangible savings for a bootstrapped company, as we don't have to hire sys admins - it's easy to leave if we must: - our product is being written in a generic framework and all GAE-specific functionality is abstracted in a separate module. - Google does not lock in the data: since release 1.2.5, it's now possible to bulk export data out of GAE - low starting costs I'll keep HN posted about the progress.