Google commercialises App Engine resources

Google App Engine has traditionally been free to use

Google has announced that users of its App Engine can now purchase additional computing resources. The firm said in a blog post today that the move will let developers scale applications beyond currently available parameters.

App Engine has traditionally been free to use, but some developers have required more functionality than had been available, according to Google.

"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," said Brett Slatkin from the App Engine team.

"You allocate this budget across CPU, bandwidth, storage and email, and you pay for only what your app consumes beyond the free thresholds."

Slatkin added that pricing is set at a dollar rate, and that the actual price UK users will pay depends on the conversion rate at the given time. Costs are charged to the nearest penny.

Users who exceed the free threshold will pay $0.10 (7p) per CPU core hour and also per gigabyte of incoming bandwidth; $0.12 (8p) per gigabyte of outgoing bandwidth; and $0.15 (10p) per gigabyte of data stored by the application per month. Emails sent by the application will cost $0.0001 (£0.00007) per recipient.

However, while Google has increased the amount of resources available at a cost, it has lowered its free quota resources, meaning that users will have to use less to fall into the newly announced paid-for bracket.

"We've learned that we overestimated our initial free quota values. Therefore, in 90 days we will be reducing the free quota resources. We believe these new levels will continue to support a reasonably efficient application serving around five million page views per month, completely free," Slatkin said.