New Prices For Google Apps Engine

First time accepted submitter oker writes "Yesterday Google announced Apps Engine would soon become a fully supported product. Unfortunately it also means a new pricing model, which is less appealing since free quotas have been lowered and you need to pay at least $9 per month if you go for the paid version."

community is not happy with this

[dolmant_php]

The mailing list has been awash in outrage and suprise as prices rise much higher than most can support. Although all knew the price increase was coming, the optimization done for the past models don't apply to the new pricing scheme, and the community is not happy about the quick change (2 weeks). http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/a1b7c68db2243932/043cbc3b7c296d06?hl=en [google.com]

Google App Engine?

[hedwards]

If you're not going to tell us what it is, perhaps linking to something that does would be in order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Engine [wikipedia.org]

Re:community is not happy with this

[dolmant_php]

A Google employee responded to these criticisms: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/msg/ee70b44979b63842?hl=en [google.com]

Re:Wonder if that means they can use profiles now

[batkiwi]

Through no real fault of your own you are confusing "google apps" with "google app engine".

"google apps" (what you are referring to) lets you run your own domain/business/school/etc using google services including mail/docs/etc. You ALSO get access to google app engine, but it has no real connection to google apps.

"google app engine" is what is being discussed here. It lets you use python or java to write your own web applciations which are run on google's cloud. You get access to google technologies such as big table/auto scaling/etc.

The issue is, google used to have a free model that was quite generous, and a paid model. The paid model actually allows you to "enable" billing, but still get a MORE generous "free" quota. This was amazing, because you could say "I'll spend up to $20 a month on this app, but simply be letting google charge me they'll let me do more for free." A lot of devs on the paid tiers still got free service. Most importantly, there was NO minimum charge per app. If an app wasn't hit a single time, it'd cost you nothing.

Now they have decreased free limits, set a minimum cost per month, and dropped the entire idea of free quotas for paid apps. This means that, for example, some people who had 5 apps deployed and spent $20/month between them now are paying at least $45, and likely several hundred due to removal/reduction of free quotas for paid accounts.

It's now cheaper to use amazon, PLUS you get more control (which can be good or not) for small open source community apps.