Google AppEngine is finally allowing applications to go beyond the quotas.  Mainly the 500 GB transfer limit was the killer because you hit a brick wall if your app was popular, unless you got a special quota which was the case on some apps helping to promote GAE. Now, to help highlight the cloud scale rather than look like a small beans hosting account with limits, it will go beyond the quotas. Of course,you will have to pay beyond that.

The pricing for space beyond the free quotas is fairly decent.  About the numbers that were put out earlier around .10 to .15 a GB.

Making the limits larger with a pay version is great for many reasons.  First for Google shareholders and most of all developers that want to develop real applications and services on GAE without the fear of hitting the brick wall when the quotas are up.  But now that wall is a payment.  I was hoping they would lift the quotas a bit more before they rolled in pricing, instead they lowered the quotas…

The pricing for resources beyond those free quotas is:

• $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

The big bummer in all this is the comment that they are reducing the free quotas:

App Engine remains free to get started. However, along with many performance improvements over the past ten months, 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 5 million page views per month, completely free.

The free quota on transfer rate is currently 500GB but will go down to approx 300GB transfer.  This will probably support a 2-5m request app monthly but the old quotas were almost double that.  So it may change some economics that were being planned for GAE.  Let’s hope the free quotas only go up like gmail from now on.

Now we just need full support for full text search, which will become the Google feature benefit I believe, hopefully soon.