Google has announced that the App Engine free quota resources will be reduced and pricing has been announced for greater-than-free tier usage. The reduction in free tier will be effective 90 days after the February 24th announcement and reduces CPU and bandwidth allocations by the following amounts:
· CPU time free tier reduced to 6.4 hours/day from 46 hours/day
· Bandwidth free tier reduced to 1 GB/day from 10 GB/day
Also announced February 24th is the charge structure for usage beyond the free-tier:
- $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used 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
–jrh
James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services
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Hi James, I have a question…
What does Google means on this: "CPU time free tier reduced to 6.4 hours/day from 46 hours/day"? what is CPU time? 6.4 hours/day means my site will be up and running 6.4 hours a day when using free appengine? what is "reduced from 36 hours/day"? I don´t understand… day has only 24 hours… maybe an app could use more time if using computers in tandem? what about an app that is not being used for a couple of hours? this extends to 8.4 the hours my app will be available on the Internet?
Thank you for all your support!
Getting service pricing to exactly parallel the cost of providing the service is very difficult to do prior to operating at scale. I expect it’ll be common to see new services need to do some tuning as they move from beta to a public offering.
–jrh
jrh@mvdirona.com
Interesting. My first impulse was that it’s kind of unfair to get people hooked and then raise the price, I’m much more likely to adopt a service if I think the provider is actually making a sustainable business out of it. Plus, even 4 hours/day of CPU time for free is pretty generous, a VPS with that kind of guaranteed CPU would be at least $30/month.
Overall the pricing is pretty attractive, on par with AWS, but the fine grained billing on CPU use seems like it could be a big savings over EC2 for web application use patterns. Plus, no worry about managing instances. On the other hand, the potential for lock-in is a little unsettling.