Is 7776000 pageviews/month the kind of traffic that you'd expect to be able to generate $80/month? $0.00001/pageview/month? If the average user viewed 1,000 pages a month, that would be $0.01/user/month.
Obviously it depends on the average pageviews per user, but what's your gut feeling? Should $80 have been too expensive?
I probably could have gotten away with paying $0 if I didn't care about the best performance.
App Engine is distributed. You get one front-end instance for free. The more front-end instances you spin up, the lower the latency for your requests (consider a fron-end instance a process, the more processes you have, the more requests you can handle in parallel, which lowers latency for each request).
All the money was spent on additional (3, I believe, front-end instances).
Was the price high? Yes, which is one reason I switched to a $60/month kimsufi server which hosts the blog and still has 99% of capacity free for other things.
It's possible I was over-paying. I'm not an App Engine expert. I picked the number of instances more on a gut-basis than a comprehensive analysis basis. I could afford it so it wasn't a big deal.
Ah, I thought GAE was spinning those instances up for you automatically. That's the default, it spins up extra instances as-needed to keep latency down. With Go apps, that's generally down to i/o from API calls.
Obviously it depends on the average pageviews per user, but what's your gut feeling? Should $80 have been too expensive?