Google App Engine Blog: Changing Quotas To Keep Most Apps Serving Free

googleappengine.blogspot.com

11 points·Anon84··7 comments

They've cut $120 a month from the free quota, and they cut it from the only two resources that really get used: Bandwidth and CPU.

I have an App Engine app that I wrote a while back but hadn't publicly released yet -- now I'm glad I didn't, because this quota change would have fucked me with a 100x cost increase.

Am I reading that right? They're dropping from 10GB free outbound transfer to 1GB?

Yes. This reduction was announced back on Feb 24 when they allowed billing:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-grow-your-ap...

Do you accept the argument that this will not affect the majority of applications on App Engine? I had the impression that large numbers of apps were already exceeding the existing quotas.

Both parts can be true at the same time.

The AppEngine team says they chose the quotas so 90% are free, so majority will not be affected. There are over 80,000 applications, so if even 1% of them are exceeding existing quotas, that's still 800 apps that are affected.

I do accept their argument, but only because the vast majority of 'apps' are abandoned and use <1mb per day. Fuck, probably at least half have never had code uploaded to them!

This change will affect everyone that actually uses GAE free hosting, even the ones using much less than 1gb/day. The way the free quota works, it's throttled to keep you from using it up all at once -- which means that anyone without billing turned on just took a massive hit to QOS.

...and cutting from 46 CPU-hours per day to just 6.5

Reply on news.ycombinator.com