Google Reveals Pricing Structure for Apps

In a rare case of actual advance financial planning on the web, Google has announced the price structure for its Google App Engine offering.  Granted Google is not necessarily the best example of financial planning in an online company, since they are all about the Benjamins with their AdWords, AdSense and other monetization strategies. It's just that it is so rare to see any company with a business plan online it stands out when it happens, like Sasquatch sightings.

What does Google App Engine do? It offers hosting for services in a way similar to Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and the AppExchange from Salesforce.  Basically, it is Google dipping its giant toes into the application side of cloud computing . Google App Engine has been in a restricted preview stage that started in April.

Behind the scenes of Google App Engine are some of Google's own technologies, including BigTable (the power behind Google Earth) and the infamous Google File System (GFS).  The preview stage is restricting users to Python, though Google has said they will include other languages in the future.  The idea behind it is that a user can have a simple, cost effective way to start a project, application or service and then have the backbone of Google to use as they scale up with increasing popularity.

The new pricing tier offers the 500MB of data and 5 million pageviews from the limits of preview stage for free. After that developers using the service will pay on a tiered structure based on actual use.  Google is as comprehensive in its price points as it is in its well-known complex search algorithm, using a variety of ways to measure and charge for use.

Once a user exceeds the 500MB of data storage or the 5 million page view limit, Google expects to charge a range of $.15 to $.18 cents per GB of data storage exceeding the limit. It also has an $.11 to $.13 cent transfer of data rate for each GB transfered out, and $.09 to $.11 cents a onth for each GB of data transfered in.

Google claims that the goal of Google App Engine is to make creating new web applications and services easier for developers. The company's target user of Google App Engine is the developer, not the end user, while other services, like Amazon, also target the end user. Google wants the developer to find a home for the future of the web on their servers, and they are making it happen with Google App Engine .