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Symphony makes $2500/month (http://www.symphonytools.com http://www.symphonytools.com). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 wee

Symphony makes $2500/month (http://www.symphonytools.com http://www.symphonytools.com). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January. It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find ways to let the world know about it.

heliodor 13y ago
Why are you still on GAE if it costs that much? I learned Django and migrated my projects off GAE a year ago. It was rather painless to learn the bits of Django needed to replace GAE, and looking back it was a great move.
- waleedka 13y ago
  I think of it as paying a little extra to outsource the boring parts of my job to Google. I don't worry about sharding, load balancing, replication, ...etc. I've done those in the past, and it wasn't that exciting. I like spending my time on code, and it lets me build things faster. App Engine has it's disadvantages as well. At one point I used typhoonae (open source framework that let's you run you GAE apps on EC2) and was about to switch, and then decided against it.
jay_kyburz 13y ago
How many users do you have for $700 a month on GAE?. My game Neptune's Pride that also makes about $2500 a month and has about 1000 - 1500 DAU only costs around $100 a month.
- waleedka 13y ago
  Only about 200 DAU (3K MAU), some are paying and the rest are on a 30-day free trial. But we do a lot of processing for each user. For example, we have a unified inbox for all your mentions and messages from all your social networks, so we pull a lot of posts on a regular basis. Our database has 3.7M records, and a total size of 15GB (8GB for data + 7GB indexes). I expect the cost per user to go down as the percent of paying to trial users goes up. Trial users stay for 30 days, and then most of them stop. But paying users continue using it much longer. Also, there is a lot of room for optimization, which I'll get around to doing later, once the key features are in place.
ruttiger 13y ago
Could you easily move out of GAE? I made a site on that platform a couple years ago for fun, and would get anxious every time I'd get an email from them with terms of service or API changes.
- waleedka 13y ago
  Not too easy, but not as hard as people expect either. The App Engine SDK is open sourced. This is the layer that connects your code to Google's infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that have taken that SDK and modified it to connect to MySQL, MongoDB, memcached, and so on. They allow you to run your GAE app on your own server, without changing your code. I tried typhoonAE a while ago and managed to get my app running on another server with about a day of work.
pm 13y ago
Hosting SHOULD NOT cost that much with GAE. What's the bulk of your cost (I'm guessing DB writes)?
- sarah2079 13y ago
  I was able to get my GAE costs way down by focusing on minimizing DB writes. Some tips: - Instead of storing an array in the database directly, store it as a json string. storing an array uses a DB write for every array element. - Don't index things if you can get away with it (indexing doubles writes). In my case I was using about 600 writes for every user action when I only needed two. This may be common knowledge, but I was pretty surprised that storing arrays was costing me so much.
  - dougk7 13y ago
    I minimise costs by using a mix of GAE and AWS: Host the main application on GAE but for background services use AWS. E.g I use AWS SES for mails and S3 for storing uploads and blobs. Also storing objects that don't need indexes as pickled blobs in a parent model helps a lot. The advantage over JSON is that you don't need extra code to parse, (de)serialized and validate the object.

heliodor 13y ago

Why are you still on GAE if it costs that much? I learned Django and migrated my projects off GAE a year ago. It was rather painless to learn the bits of Django needed to replace GAE, and looking back it was a great move.

waleedka 13y ago
I think of it as paying a little extra to outsource the boring parts of my job to Google. I don't worry about sharding, load balancing, replication, ...etc. I've done those in the past, and it wasn't that exciting. I like spending my time on code, and it lets me build things faster. App Engine has it's disadvantages as well. At one point I used typhoonae (open source framework that let's you run you GAE apps on EC2) and was about to switch, and then decided against it.

jay_kyburz 13y ago

How many users do you have for $700 a month on GAE?. My game Neptune's Pride that also makes about $2500 a month and has about 1000 - 1500 DAU only costs around $100 a month.

waleedka 13y ago
Only about 200 DAU (3K MAU), some are paying and the rest are on a 30-day free trial. But we do a lot of processing for each user. For example, we have a unified inbox for all your mentions and messages from all your social networks, so we pull a lot of posts on a regular basis. Our database has 3.7M records, and a total size of 15GB (8GB for data + 7GB indexes). I expect the cost per user to go down as the percent of paying to trial users goes up. Trial users stay for 30 days, and then most of them stop. But paying users continue using it much longer. Also, there is a lot of room for optimization, which I'll get around to doing later, once the key features are in place.

ruttiger 13y ago

Could you easily move out of GAE? I made a site on that platform a couple years ago for fun, and would get anxious every time I'd get an email from them with terms of service or API changes.

waleedka 13y ago
Not too easy, but not as hard as people expect either. The App Engine SDK is open sourced. This is the layer that connects your code to Google's infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that have taken that SDK and modified it to connect to MySQL, MongoDB, memcached, and so on. They allow you to run your GAE app on your own server, without changing your code. I tried typhoonAE a while ago and managed to get my app running on another server with about a day of work.

pm 13y ago

Hosting SHOULD NOT cost that much with GAE. What's the bulk of your cost (I'm guessing DB writes)?

sarah2079 13y ago
I was able to get my GAE costs way down by focusing on minimizing DB writes. Some tips: - Instead of storing an array in the database directly, store it as a json string. storing an array uses a DB write for every array element. - Don't index things if you can get away with it (indexing doubles writes). In my case I was using about 600 writes for every user action when I only needed two. This may be common knowledge, but I was pretty surprised that storing arrays was costing me so much.
- dougk7 13y ago
  I minimise costs by using a mix of GAE and AWS: Host the main application on GAE but for background services use AWS. E.g I use AWS SES for mails and S3 for storing uploads and blobs. Also storing objects that don't need indexes as pickled blobs in a parent model helps a lot. The advantage over JSON is that you don't need extra code to parse, (de)serialized and validate the object.