News

Google To Impose Fees for App Engine

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• February 25, 2009

Nearly one year after releasing its free cloud-based hosting service for developers of Python-based applications, Google revealed a new fee structure for those making active use of the offering.

While the company will continue to offer basic use of its Google App Engine for free, new usage quotas will take effect on May 25. The news is not a surprise; Google had indicated it planned to offer fee-based services beyond the quotas initially put in place.

The company revealed the new pricing structure Tuesday on the Google App Engine Blog. "You can now set a daily budget for your app that represents the maximum amount you're willing to pay for computing resources each day," wrote Google app engine team member Brett Slatkin.

He added that developers pay only beyond the free thresholds, pro-rated to the nearest penny. Even with the new quotas, developers can run applications serving approximately 5 million page views per month using the free service, he noted.

The new per-day limits are capped at 6.5 hours of CPU time and 1GB of data transfer (in and out of the app). Stored data and e-mail quotas remain unchanged at 1GB. The company published further details on the pricing structure.

The additional fees are as follows:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour
• $0.10 per gigabyte bandwidth inbound and $0.12 per gigabyte outbound
• $0.15 per gigabyte of data stored by an app per month
• $0.0001 per e-mail recipient for messages sent by an app

The company is targeting the Google App Engine for developers looking to build data-intensive applications. Google offers a development environment and set of APIs. The environment supports dynamic Web serving, queryable persistent storage to support transactions, scaling and load balancing.