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I am running an app/website with at max 200 visitors per day. It was running for a monthly cost around 5€. It is a python 3 flask app in standard env.

But since the 17th of june, I began to get billed around 1€ per day. Prevision for 36€ at the end of the month.

It stopped for the 20th of june. Restarted, and then stopped again the 26th and restarted again the 30th of june. All I can see is that it is front-end instance uptime cost.

I have deleted my old versions so I can't see any relevant stats.But the trafic is still the same at around 200 visitors per day, as say analytics.

I did not change anything to my app. I thought they were more users using a page that making use of Google TTS API. This pages makes request to my site, so I thought more requests were causing more uptime.

I changed back that page to use an old (deprecated) microsoft TTS API, so that users use ajax, and do not hit my site.

But I am seeing no change, and I am still billed 1€ per day. I don't know why.

Correction: My changes cut back the cost down to 0.6€ per day. But that is 6 times the previous cost. So, the question remains.

solsTiCe
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  • ask the support of the vendor to get the clarification – djdomi Jul 10 '21 at 11:51
  • Same problem here. I have 20,000% cost increase this month. I have contacted the support and they didn't have a clue why it happened. They forwarded my report to technical support a week ago and I still haven't heard back from them. – Viktor Brešan Jul 29 '21 at 20:31
  • Yes. the support was clueless. Without admitting it. They did not really help me. Please report back here if you can. I am migrating to another host, to cut cost. that is a shame.One explanation could be, that as I was over quota once, I have to pay for it, now even though I am under quota now. I didn't understand their rules that way. May be there is an error from their part. They might no be aware. – solsTiCe Jul 29 '21 at 22:01
  • I don't understand. I just looked at the cost summary, and the cost went down after the 25th of july with no apparent reason. so it is "normal" again ??? – solsTiCe Jul 30 '21 at 09:49

1 Answers1

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I suspect that the Google App Engine scheduling algorithms have changed though I didn't get confirmation from Google.

In any case, the system has started to interpret the existing traffic load differently and for that reason it launches additional app instances more aggressively. And additional instances beef up the bill.

Per user support suggestion, I solved the problem by defining max-instances and max-idle-instances to be 1 (in app configuration file, as described here).

Viktor Brešan
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  • I tried playing with that without success some time ago. Your asnwer just come for me a day too late, as I have completed my migration to another host namely [pythonanywhere](https://eu.pythonanywhere.com/?affiliate_id=00003a92) – solsTiCe Aug 04 '21 at 22:06