Google announces pricing for App Engine

Google adds pricing details and new features to its application development hosting environment

Google has announced pricing details for its application development hosting services, and released its first public API.

The service was announced as a limited preview in April, and although was only open to some 10,000 developers, that was boosted to some 60,000. Now it is expected that all the 150,000 developers on the waiting list will gain access.

Google will offer 500mb of data, and 5m page views per month for free. New charges, however will result from more data being used, developers will pay approximately 10p per GB of monthly data and slightly less per hour of CPU time consumed. Bandwidth costs going out are roughly the same, although it costs slightly more to take data out, than in. Pricing will not come into force until later this year.

New features include a caching API, which Google said would make rendering new features and applications much faster.