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Google Announces Pricing for App Engine: Allows Developers to Scale Beyond Free Quotas

Written by Frederic Lardinois / February 24, 2009 11:30 AM / 6 Comments

app_engine_logo_feb09.pngGoogle today finally announced its pricing plans for its App Engine service. Google's App Engine allows developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure and, until today, was only available in a free, but restricted, version. The free version currently gives developers up to 500MB of persistent storage and CPU power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. Starting today, however, developers will also be able to purchase additional resources, which will enable them to scale their apps beyond these free quotas.

For the next 90 days, the free allotment will remain unchanged, but after that, Google will reduce the free quota resources. At the same time, however, it will also double the free storage quota to 1GB. Google argues that the other changes won't impact the large majority of "well written" apps running on the service right now.

According to Google, App Engine billing was one of the most requested features from App Engine developers. Thanks to this new pricing scheme, developers can now use App Engine to deploy larger and more popular applications on the service without hitting the ceiling of Google's free quotas. Developers will be able to set daily budgets for their apps and allocate this budget across CPU, bandwidth, storage, and email.

Some of the most popular apps that are currently using Google's App Engine are BuddyPoke, Lingospot, Best Buy's Giftag.com, and Mental Floss.

Pricing

Here is the new pricing scheme according to Google's blog post:

  • $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as that for any Datastore usage.
  • $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing.  This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.
  • $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.
  • $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

Google first announced that it was planning to offer these pay-as-you-go resources to developers last May, and today's prices are at the lower end of the ranges that Google announced back then.

In general, Google's prices seem to be slightly cheaper and less complicated than Amazon's pricing schemes for using its EC2 and S3 service. It should be noted, however, that Amazon offers a far larger feature set than App Engine. App Engine only supports the Python programming language, while EC2 gives you access to a complete, remotely hosted, on-demand operating system.

Coming Soon: XMPP, Scheduled Task, Mail

Earlier this month, Google also announced a number of new features that will appear in App Engine in the next six month, including the ability to receive and process mail, support for running scheduled tasks, and support for sending and receiving XMPP messages.


Comments

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  1. Wow, this is amazing news ! And thanks to ReadWriteWeb to be among the first blogs to write about this.

    Posted by: Mesjours | February 24, 2009 12:04 PM



  2. USA Grosbank IN KRIZE

    von Raivo Pommer -Eesti

    Die bisher in der Finanzkrise stets profitable US-Großbank J.P. Morgan Chase streicht ihre Dividende drastisch zusammen. Die Quartalsausschüttung werde um fast 90 Prozent auf lediglich noch 0,05 Dollar je Aktie gekürzt, teilte der Konzern mit.

    Der Bank blieben so pro Jahr fünf Milliarden Dollar (4 Mrd Euro) mehr in der Kasse. Im laufenden ersten Quartal sieht sich J.P. Morgan weiter in der Gewinnzone. Die Reserven etwa für faule Kredite hätten allerdings nochmals aufgestockt werden müssen, hieß es am Montagabend (Ortszeit) nach US-Börsenschluss in New York. Mit ihren Zahlen sieht sich die Bank derzeit im Rahmen der Analystenerwartungen. Experten gehen bisher von einem Ergebnis je Aktie von 0,35 Dollar aus im Vergleich zu noch 0,68 Dollar ein Jahr zuvor.

    Posted by: raivo pommer | February 24, 2009 12:50 PM



  3. Developers should also consider either Aptana Cloud or Joyent Accelerators. Joyent currently has quite a good deal for a small scale server instance preconfigured with PHP, Apache, Rails, MySQL, etc. Aptana runs on Joyent servers but adds lots of bells and whistles for less experienced developers. However, that is at the expense of total control of the server.

    Justin Noel

    Posted by: AppBeacon | February 24, 2009 7:54 PM



  4. Great job by Google. Only thing left to do is open it up for other languages and they'll have Amazon on their heels.

    Posted by: Ian | February 24, 2009 9:21 PM



  5. Amazon Web Services has become the leader of the gang.
    They even have IBM (+ IBM Gobal Services) support (= big world wide sales force).
    Google is lagging behind in a business you would expect them to lead.
    Google needs to find a market niche between:
    - Microsoft addressing "their" Small to Medium business market
    - AWS has the early adopters (Geeks?)
    - IBM (AWS) the larger enterprises

    Posted by: Engago Team | February 25, 2009 12:47 AM



  6. Raivo Pommer

    raimo1@hot.ee

    Bank LBBW Krise

    Dies erfuhr die Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa am Freitag aus Finanzkreisen. Im Vergleich zu 2007 hat sich die Summe damit mehr als vervierfacht - damals lag der Betrag bei 186 Millionen Euro. Vor einigen Wochen hatte es in Finanzkreisen geheißen, 2008 habe sich die Risikovorsorge auf mehr als 500 Millionen Euro erhöht.

    Baden-Württembergs Sparkassen-Präsident Peter Schneider sagte den «Stuttgarter Nachrichten» (Samstag), diese Entwicklung sei kein Widerspruch zu den derzeit gut laufenden Geschäften: «Wir kommen an Kunden, die wir vorher nicht hatten und das zu Konditionen, die das Risiko abbilden», sagte Schneider, der auch Vorsitzender des Verwaltungsrates der LBBW ist, dem Blatt.

    Grund für den rapiden Anstieg sind Informationen aus Finanzkreisen zufolge vor allem sinkende Bonitätsnoten für Unternehmen. Da die Finanzkrise zunehmend auf die Realwirtschaft übergreift, steigt die Gefahr, dass Kreditnehmer ihren Verpflichtungen nicht mehr nachkommen können.

    Posted by: fuzer | March 20, 2009 1:29 PM



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