I have a few applications running on App Engine and am using Google Apps to connect domains and do business e-mail. I've had these apps for over 2 years now and they are my livelihood. I'm a Passive Income Hacker.<p>When App Engine and Google Apps made their debut, I poured hours into learning them. I evangelized them to other developers and balked at the idea of vendor lock-in affecting me. I knew that Google's "Do no evil" mantra was probably hyperbole, but I figured they couldn't be worse than Microsoft.<p>I COMPLETELY regret using App Engine and building a business based on Google technologies. I will not make the same mistake again. Since I have launched my apps, Google has<p>1. Completely changed the App Engine pricing model from one based on CPU time to datastore writes.<p>2. Deprecated their first attempt at a datastore and replaced it with one that costs 3x as much (called HRD). There's lots of reports of people having problems with their migration tools.<p>3. Created a $500/mo support plan that you need in order to get any sort of help from their engineers--even when you have a disruption localized to your environment.<p>4. Deprecated the ability to write to the Blobstore using an experimental API - However the API was experimental for 3 or 4 years, so a lot of people grew to depend on it.<p>5. Removed the ability to associate a domain with your app engine account for free through Google Apps. Now you have to pay $50/year or $5/month and you get an app engine credit you may or may not use.<p>6. Have taken away e-mail quota for new applications so you can only send 100 e-mails a day and you have to file a support request if you want to ramp it up. You may or may not be allowed.<p>7. Forced users to upgrade their MapReduce version to a new one which uses a completely different API and requires significant code rewrites.<p>8. Maintained a "take it or leave it" attitude with an iron fist.<p>When I started with App Engine. I bought into the idea that I'd have them take care of the infrastructure and I could "sit back and scale out." I've had to put so much work into maintaining my apps because of their infrastructural changes it's ridiculous. If I would have just gone with a VPS or EC2, I might have had to replicate a database and write some scripts to automate backups, but at least I would've been able to decide if I wanted to change my code or not. With App Engine, I've been completely at Google's mercy. All that, <i>and</i> NO database joins :-(
Looking at one of the responses, the user might have cancelled their service instead of downgrading back to the free plan.<p><a href="http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/apps/tevkcnsb7-w/CQkhbnLnrXcJ" rel="nofollow">http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/apps/tevkcnsb7-w/CQkhb...</a>
This happened to me. THE TRIAL IS A TRAP!<p>Seriously, do NOT test this out unless you want to be put on the paid version of Google Apps. It's completely underhanded and false ... they will feed you some rubbish about how you 'cancelled your account' instead of stopping the trial and that they can't do anything to help.<p>I repeat: THE TRIAL IS A TRAP<p>Do no evil my arse ...
The "downgrade" option that used to be there is gone. When I click on "Billing" on the dashboard I get:<p><pre><code> Cancel Google Apps for Business
Your subscription to Google Apps for Business will be cancelled immediately, and all user data will be deleted. You cannot undo this process.
</code></pre>
This doesn't sound like a 24 disruption to me. So far I haven't been able to find the down grade option.<p>Nice one Google! (not)