I purpose to develop a location-based mobile music platform that will be available on Android for my senior project. The application records details of each track the user listens to, either directly from the interface of the app, or Spotify (Android) and matches these information with the exact location of the user when he listens to the track on the map. By means of this, there will be a very large data set which contains the information of which track every user listens to and where it is listened in progress of time. By grouping and scrapping these data, the information of actual number of people listening to each track in a specific region will be obtained. In this way, when the user wants to see and listen to popular tracks in which region he is located, the system presents some charts, including Top Tracks, Top Artists, and Top Albums. Moreover, the user will not just listen to the playlist of top tracks in the region he is located. The playlist which is specialized for a region includes the recommended tracks which are derived from top tracks. On the other hand, using a mapping interface, the user can mark wherever he wants and see the charts and listen to the playlist of other regions with ease. In other words, a user from Brown University not just listens to the playlist of Providence Rhode Island, he can also listen to the playlist of Barcelona Catalonia, or even a region locates at far end of the world.
Nevertheless, I do not have knowledge of which backend as a service may meet the needs of such a system. I cannot predict future requirements for this application. What I need to run in the cloud? Storage, SQL, prediction, datastore? Which BaaS provider? Google Cloud Platform, kumulos, Parse, or any other one? Can you answer these questions considering cost issues as a priority?
In terms of costs and predictability I'd recommend you go with a plan thats easy to predict costs. So I'd go with a plan that charges you a fixed monthly fee, like Kumulos does. According to their website its $10 for 1m API calls a month. And from talking to them its $10 for the next million, so at least you can predict your costs.. just my 2c worth