Wednesday, August 31, 2011

$50 Credit for new billing signups and budget changes

At Google I/O this year, we announced that App Engine will be going out of preview before the end of the year.  One aspect of leaving preview is our new pricing model.  As promised we have started providing the ability for any application Admin to compare their existing cost to their new costs in the Admin Console (under “Billing History”).  Now that you have an idea of what changes may impact your app, we’ve also written an article to help you optimize your application.  We know many of you would rather code than think about your budget and billing settings, so to help with the transition we are extending a one-time courtesy credit of $50 to all free Apps that sign up for billing and all paid Apps that modify their budgets between now and October 31, 2011.  Once you have signed up or made changes to your billing settings, a $50 credit will appear in the “Billing History” area of the Admin Console for your application. For more information on how to enable billing or change your settings, please see Billing and Budgeting Resources.

This is a big step for the App Engine Team; thank you for your continued support and feedback, and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!

Posted by the App Engine Team


Vitriolix said...

Wow, the Channel API channel opening quota is now 100 for users? Is the hard cap even on billed usage lifted?

isaacwang said...

There is a typo on the 'Managing Your App's Resources' optimization page. In the 'Managing Bandwidth' section, there is an extra c in 'Cacche-Control'.

randall said...

I'm confused by the new instance-hour pricing model. My free-to-users app is running six instances that are collectively using .09% CPU time and eightysomething MB of RAM. Right now they would cost 48 cents/hour, which could get me a lot of virtual-machine time elsewhere. I could use fewer instances if I tweaked the scheduling policy and used concurrent requests once my language supports them, but the point is that my current pattern would cost a lot without using much actual CPU and RAM in App Engine's clusters.

Maybe processes are getting high guaranteed resources like a VM, so the price reflects the cost of a process to App Engine? Maybe there will be improvements that make processes as versatile as VMs, or you feel that they already are?

I understand the need for a price increase in general -- App Engine needs to recover its costs and prices were low. It's the way usage is measured that has me confused, not the fact we'll be charged more for usage.

Luke said...

People might be interested with the comments being posted on hackernews about this.

AixAce said...

Not good Google...

Anonymous said...

Two quick questions:

- When is it going to be out of "preview"? After Oct.?

- Do I understand correctly that "Task vs. Backend" ends up in price & resource allocation?



yubiT said...

Can you shed some light on whether SSL for custom domains will be enabled when you make the price change? Thanks!

Omega Xi said...

Sorry if this seems like a dumb question, but how will this affect people just using google apps for things like it's mail service? Or is this completely unrelated and I'm being silly?

Efi MK said...

Hi Guys,

There is a lot of uproar on the new billing and we haven't heard any word from you.

Please comment, say something.

Efi MK said...

Hi Guys,


Please comment, say something.

A1programmer said...

I can say this, if something doesn't change. I'm leaving GAE.

scriptster said...

How do I report and request a takedown of a Google App used to spam web logs for fake referrals?

Please provide a URL to such form.


Stefano Terna said...

ssl for custom domains?
Will it be managed since you are going out of preview?

Zenon - The tiny programmer said...

I'm an programmer, One thing i HATE about cloud's in general is the fact that they are product/company specific. The fact that i cant take an application built for GAE and run it on my personal cluster or maybe amazon even rackspace
annoys me quite the bit actually

You could publish an SDK maybe an apache module/or simply an set of python classes

that would replace all GAE specific API's with either public ones or local ones
An call to the mail API turns into an call to the local mail on the server
On the other hand an call to the image API turns into an remote call with API keys and everything

I'm 16 by the way,And i'l have gotten a job with you by 20 i promise :)
Iceland -