How to get free tier?

[J]

Maybe I'm the only one but I find the new pricing page incredibly confusing to read: http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html

It looks like there's still a free tier, but it doesn't include usage based pricing, infinite scalability, and SLA.  My question is how do I get the free tier?  Is this setting somewhere?  Or is this determined automatically by GAE?

If I use the free tier (once I figure out how), and it doesn't include usage based pricing or infinite scalability, what actually happens when I exceed free quota limits (in regards to usage based pricing) or if traffic spikes (in regards to infinite scalability)?

Thanks,

J

[Gregory D'alesandre]

Hi J,

When you create an application you are automatically in the free tier.  You can switch to the paid tier by adding credit card information and choosing a maximum budget per day.  In the free tier you can't exceed quota limits, so if you app hits those limits it will no longer be able to use that resource until the following day when the limits are reset.  For many of these limits it means your app will likely stop running (for instance, if you run out of Frontend Instance Hours you can no longer serve traffic through your Frontends).  Once you are in the paid tier you'll use free quota each day until it is used up and then pay for what you use with a minimum payment of $2.10/week.  

You can handle traffic spikes in the free tier but it will consume more resources.  So, for instance, you get 28 Frontend Instance Hours for free each day.  If you are serving traffic from a single instance all day until 1PM and then have a traffic spike from 1 - 2 which consumes 10 instance hours, you'll have used 23 of the 28 instance hours for that day and so will only be able to use 5 more instance hours for the rest of the day.  So, while there is scalability in the free tier there is not infinite scalability as you are limited by the number of instance hours.

I hope that helps, feel free to ask if you have any additional questions!

Greg

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[Brandon Wirtz]

Free, and Infinite will rarely be something you can have both of. :-)