Would I be correct in assuming that a user of my iOS app that uses CloudKit would not need to pay a monthly fee to Apple to use my CloudKit app? Apple just changed from annual to monthly for anything above 5GB for iCloud... or is it unrelated? I've been hunting around Apples development site and I cannot seem to find a reference for who gets charged a fee for use of CloudKit. WWDC made brief reference that there is a limit that can be reached and it seemed like they were indicating that the developer would have to pay Apple if their user base exceeded a certain point. If that's the case, a developer would have to be very careful to make sure they charge enough for the app. It could get expensive if there is a sudden increase in app use by a smaller number of users.
When you store data in the public database, then it counts as data for your app. If you store data in the private database, then it's counted at the user's account (now max 5GB for free). If you want to know how much data is available for free for your app, then have a look here: https://developer.apple.com/icloud/documentation/cloudkit-storage/
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I have an App that consumes my own API (Google Cloud Functions) and my own Storage (there are images).
Now, I have a couple of clients, that wants to consume my API and my Storage (A Google Cloud Bucket).
The Cloud Storage is a bucket that contains a lot of photo that have Public Read Access.
I'm trying to define a tier pricing model, in which the price depends on 2 things:
The number of API calls,
The Cloud Storage Bandwidth
Meaning, I want to set some pricing in relation to the costs they are consuming on my Google Cloud account.
To give an example:
If a client does between 1 and 500.000 API calls, I'll change them 10 dollars. Between 500.001 and 1.000.000, I'll charge 18 dollars, etc, etc.
Same thing for the Cloud Storage Bandwidth, if they consume between 0GM and 10GB, it's going to cost 10 dollars. If they consume between 10GB and 100GB, it's going to cost 18 dollars, etc, etc.
How can I do it with Google Cloud? How can I know how my clients are consuming? And is there a way to share that information with them, so they are able to monitor the usage every day?
I'm thinking that measuring the API usage is not going to be THAT hard, because I can just save a value in the DB every time the user calls the API, but if there is a way to avoid it, will be good, due to Google Cloud is going to charge me for that DB write action (that I use to track the API usage).
On the other hand, for measuring the Cloud Storage, I was thinking something like this:
Let's suppose I have a Public Bucket with photos in the URL: buckets.google.com/photos.
If my client wants to get the /cats/ugly-cat.jpg photo, I can ask them to call A FUNCTION in /api/get-photo/?url=/cats/ugly-cat.jpg, so there in that Function a can track that the user just get a photo, and then I redirect the call to the real URL where the user is going to see the photo (buckets.google.com/photos/cats/ugly-cat.jpg). As you can see, this idea seems to be too ppor performant, due to it's going to charge the Function usage, the DB write, and also the Storage bandwidth usage. And even, that way doesn't track the Bandwidth. It only tracks the number of photos that the client wants to show.
As you can see, both ideas are a bit ugly, with poor performance.
There should be something already done that makes it beautiful.
Obviously, the API call (and also the photo link) may have the client API-KEY, to help to measure the usage. Something like:
functions.google.com/api/search-photos/?api-key=111, and
bucket.google.com/photos/cats/ugly-cat.jpg?api-key=111
Where 111 identifies the client 111.
So, the question: Do you know if there is a "best-known" way to do measure those usages?
I think Cloud Endpoints is the best solution for you because managing your API as you suggest might get unwieldy quickly.
Endpoints provides all the tools to control authentication, quota and cost management and a developer portal so your users can access documentation and interact with your API. It also integrates with all Cloud Platform products including Cloud Functions.
I am working on standing up a mobile app with Google Datastore as backend database. I am debating whether google datastore is right choice for below use cases vs other datastorage options google offers. We are a small team and we don't want to incur lot of operations costs in the initial run. Application will have the following use cases:
User registration and profile which will take user personal identification details like credit cards, bank account , emails,address etc
Various subscription plans like yearly subscription price, monthly subscription price and pay per single service . User will be charged with bank account or credit card set on user profile
Mobile app will be launched within next 2 months and i am expecting at-least 1000 users in first few months
Appreciate your feedback at this stage where we are laying down the foundation of the app
Thank you
Datastore is good to manage user profiles and the use cases that you're referring as well it has free quota amounts and low costs regarding its usage and it'll be a better option compared with Cloud SQL which price and storage capacity is limited to the machine type that you're using. Additionally, as this isn't a technical inquiry, but a solution concern, I suggest posting this on the Datastore Google Groups where ideas regarding the Datastore and other products would be properly exchanged.
I am looking into online stores to use internally at a company. They would like to be able to add credit to a users account as part of an incentive program.
I have started looking at Online store software, but am not clear as to which support store credit, or if it is a function of the payment module (ie separate issue).
The credit shouldn't be in the form of actual money (so it shouldn't be like putting money on a users paypal account), but credit which can be redeemed in-store.
You could implement this easily in Satchmo with the Giftcertificate-Module. You can assign a GiftCertificate an amount of money and the user owning this code can use it on checkout to pay. If the cart-amount is less, then the GC can be used afterwards with the rest-money on it. And if it isn't enough money on it, the user can pay the rest with any other payment method available.
Magento has this functionallity built into their commercial editions.
I am working on a civics related project and I need to be able to display all the properties in the City of Philadelphia on a map, so I'll need to get the latitude & longitude for all 580,000 properties. (Only once)
Most APIs like Google/Yahoo have limits of 5,000 per day, and even BatchGeo has a similar limit.
Is there a way I can do a one-time geocoding of all these addresses?
You can find a list of free and paid geocoding services at USC site.
Also check Microsoft's Geocode Dataflow API, it allows up to 200,000 entries / 300 Mb and takes up to 14 days.
Another possibility to combine several services at once: use 4 services that allow 5,000 entries a day and you'll finish your task in a month.
You can use Map Quest of Cloud Made.
I have created a small utility to help compare these API's.
The utility is hosted at below url:
http://ankit-zalani.appspot.com/GeoCode/index.jsp
Tobias, I work for an address verification (and recently, geocoding) company called SmartyStreets.
Many services have usage restrictions based on volume and license agreements which prevent users from storing the results of geocoding queries. There are some vendors, however, which don't have limits or restrictions like that.
I would recommend something like LiveAddress which will not only geocode the addresses but also perform CASS-Certified verification to make sure your addresses are correct before giving you potentially faulty coordinates. You can run 580,000 or even millions at a time in a few minutes, and we allow you to store your results.
Hope this helps. If you have any more questions about addresses, I'll personally assist.
This thread is pretty old by now, but there have been some developments in recent years making bulk geocoding very cheap. My favorite option is to just obtain a geocoding server on AWS ( google: geocoding on aws), many options there, some free some with low hourly rates (total cost depends on the server you choose, of course.)
I've been tasked with setting up a society's website. I'm a full time Django (at al) web developer so I was happy to take on the task.
Going through the specs, they want to control memberships so that all applications need a "second" (read: sponsor, referee, etc) and then they need to pay a subscription fee to be part of the club.
This club has a number of events with variable ticket prices for lunches and talks to name two. Only members are allowed to see the price per ticket and therefore only members are allowed to buy the tickets.
I had originally planned on farming the event management off to EventBrite and pulling the upcoming events back to the website through EB's API but this members-only constraint looks like something EventBrite can't do.
Then there's processing members subscriptions. I had hoped to allow anybody to register a django.contrib.auth account but leave subscription payment offline but the client would be happier if they could mark accounts as "members", store the subscription data in the database and let the members pay online.
Like with EventBrite, I was hoping I could store rough membership data (whether or not they're allowed to subscribe, a unique token for the user on the API service, their level of membership and their membership's expiry) and there'd be something I could post users off to to process their subscription payment.
I basically don't want to touch any payment systems. Even something as simple as Paypal+IPN is something I'd rather not do (I can and have in the past on other projects) but it's the layer of management that I'd have to build around it (messaging members, creating recurring events, etc) that I'd like to farm out to a third party... Even if they do want an additional percent of the payments processed.
Do any of you know any suitable APIs that cover membership or events or both?
Or is this so complex that I should give up hoping for external help and just knuckle down and do it myself?
I think the google search you are looking for is online membership management. I don't know if any of them play particularly nicely with Django/python, but some of them do include APIs. Almost all of these are companies that charge, either for the system, or on a per-user basis.
If you don't mind installing something yourself, CiviCRM is a free, open source solution that I found with a bit of googling. It's integrates with either Joomla or Drupal (so probably PHP-based). You'd have to put the payment processing in yourself, but it does support payments using PayPal which would take handling payments mostly out of the equation. If you can, choose PayPal Express rather than PayPal Website Payments Pro since you may need to be PCI-DSS compliant to use the latter.