Now that the Open Journal Matcher is live and receiving traffic, I’m wondering how much it is going to cost to keep running.

There isn’t an obvious answer. Mostly this is because Google Cloud Functions scale with your project. This is definitely good for scalability and availability, but it makes it much more difficult to budget. When I flipped the switch to turn on the OJM, I really had no idea how expensive it would be.

(Needless to say, this is a different, contrasting billing approach to PythonAnywhere – which I talked about in my last post)

Since the project has been online for two months, the costs are becoming more clear now. There have been some big spikes in traffic ($141 worth of traffic on August 10th), as well as some quiet periods. At least now I can start to calculate some meaningful averages.

I have a bit of time to figure out funding for the future, since my Google Cloud Platform Credit grant runs until January. The looming question is how much will it cost to fund the project after that?

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.