Google 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.
