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I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to require, which would be disappointing.

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Instance hours come into play when, for example, you run multiple versions of an app that get traffic, multiple instances for handling high load, or if you have separate front- and back-end instances. A typical user only has one instance going at a time, so no more than 24 instance-hours. (Instance hours have been a thing for at least a couple of years.)

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