As Google App Engine moves out of “preview”, a new pricing model has been revealed. This new pricing model is expected to come into effect sometime in September. Google has made available to App Engine users comparisons of their current bills versus expected bills with the new pricing model.

Things don’t look pretty. In short this is what has happened:

• “Free” quotas have been drastically reduced
• Price of various billiable “units” has seen a sharp rise

The reaction of the Google App Engine customer base has been predictable. Here are some quotes from the official Google App Engine mailing list / group:

“We are going from $5,400/month to $26,500/month (Python) – and this is only one of our apps. We are going to work hard to optimize our application because we really like App Engine, but failing that, we may have to move elsewhere.” Jason Collins

“Sorry google, but that doesn’t work for me. It makes more sense to go back to django and run the apps on a box in my home. I’ve disabled my apps as of today.” Johnny G

“Is it really 10 times the original cost.!! Now we will be paying from $200/month to $2000/month under new billing. Just out of our reach, does not make any business sense to stay with GAE.” smwatch

“I love Google App Engine, but right now I am at a loss for what to do. My current billing is $4.98/day. Under the new system it is $34.41/day, and that is with the 50% frontend discount. The effort that would be involved in porting my app to a different architecture is far beyond what I could accomplish in the next few weeks, and to be honest I don’t want to move off of App Engine.” Michael Robellard

“It’s 300% for me (3x what I pay now). Most of the cost is datastore writes and reads, followed by instance hours.” Waleed

“For my app, Aug 26, estimated increase of ~150%.” Will Xu

“For mine (python): 317% I think I am forced to leave GAE to EC2.” Raymond C

Is Google setting a precedent for unreliable and unstable cloud billing? Are they pricing themselves out of this market?

If you go by the most popular thread in the Google App Engine community – Keep it short: Who is forced to leave GAE? – then the answer is yes!