Google App Engine costs the same as any shared hosting

There are many good and bad things about GAE but this issue with the new pricing is just strange in my eyes:

Every paid app must pay google at least $9 each month regardless of usage.

The main awesome thing about GAE has always been the pay-as-you-need pricing model. This concept is completely shattered now for a certain scale of apps. The Python 3 Wall of Shame needed a few extra DB writes to finish the day nicely which would have cost roughly 10 cents a day. But now google will be rounding that up to 30 cents a day.

Apps that grow to use $1 worth of quotas a month are much better off heading to some form of shared hosting for $5.50 a month until they hit that $9 a month necessity. That’s the case with the Python3WOS and another one of my apps. I can’t move the wall of shame as I don’t have the time to do the porting (locked in ಠ_ಠ), but that other app is simple enough. So google will never find out if it could have been an app that’s actually worth $9 monthly.