A few adjustments to App Engine’s upcoming pricing changes

Last week we rolled out side-by-side billing to give you a more detailed preview of how you’ll be affected by the price changes that we announced in May. We received a variety of feedback and have made a few important changes based on it. Our intent is to be as open and transparent about the changes as possible and to give you enough time to prepare. In that spirit, our Engineering Director has also shared some of his personal thoughts.

We understand that the new rates surprised some of you. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and we wanted to share an update on the changes we’re making to help ensure you have an accurate picture of how the new pricing will affect your app. Although prices will increase, we’re confident that you’ll find App Engine still provides great value.

Based on your feedback we’re taking the following steps:

• Extended review period: We’re now giving you almost eight weeks before introducing the new pricing. You now have until November 1 to configure and tune your application to manage your costs. 
• Increased free Instance Hours: We are increasing the number of free Instance Hours from 24 to 28. This means that people who are using a free app to try out App Engine can run a single instance all day with a few spikes and still remain below our free quota.  This will be reflected in the comparison bills soon.
• Extended discount: We’ll continue to offer the 50% discount on instance prices until December 1st, at which time Python 2.7 should be available. Python 2.7 will include support for concurrent requests, which could further lower your costs. 
• Faster Usage Reports: We appreciate the importance of quickly being able to see the effect your tuning has on your bill and starting today we’ll provide your Usage Report (and the included comparison bills) within one day instead of the previous three. 
• Better analysis tools: We are working on better ways for you to model the cost of your apps. We will add the “billing” line into the instances graph on the Admin Console. We’re adding datastore billing information into the dev console to making it easier for you to track how the changes you make affect your bill, which should also help lower the cost. 
• Premier accounts: we know a lot of our customers are eagerly awaiting Premier accounts to get operational support, offline billing, unlimited accounts, and the SLA. So we will not wait until November 1st for this, but rather launch Premier accounts as soon as possible.  If you are interested in a Premier account, please contact us at appengine_premier_requests@google.com.

We also wanted to share some of the main ways for you to lower your bill and get a better sense of the true cost of App Engine:

• Set Max Idle instances: Setting Max Idle Instances to a lower level will help lower your costs as we will only charge for idle instances up to the maximum you set. This could impact your performance so it’s worth reading up on the ramifications. 
• Always-On reflected in bills: Currently the side-by-side bills still include the cost of always-on even though it will be retired when the new pricing launches (to be replaced by min idle instances). We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate. 
• Reserved instance hours: The simplest way to lower the charge for instance hours is to consider using reserved instance hours. They are 37.5% cheaper than on-demand, but you do need to commit to a certain number of them over the course of a week. 
• Managing resources: Check out this article, which provides more helpful advice on how to efficiently manage your resources and lower costs. 

We launched App Engine in preview three years ago to make it easier for you to build, maintain and scale web applications. Since then, we’ve added many features like Java and Go language support, created a High Replication Datastore, and added many other APIs. And there’s a lot more cool stuff to come. It’s heartening to us that so many developers- 150,000 and counting- have chosen to use App Engine to run their apps. While we can’t continue to offer App Engine at our original prices, we can commit to listening to your feedback, acting on it, and working hard to give you a great platform for your apps at the most competitive price possible. If you find that’s not the case, or have any questions about this at all, please feel free to contact us at appengine_updated_pricing@google.com.

The App Engine Team