Google said on Tuesday that Google App Engine would offer additional computing resources for developers this year and announced pricing for the service. Developers using Google App Engine, which lets outsiders build Web applications on the same infrastructure that runs Google's own applications, will have a free quota of 500MB of storage and enough computing power and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month.

"After years of competition among platforms, the web has won because it's open, because it's ubiquitous, and because there's a passionate community working together to move it forward," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for developer products at Google. "Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The web doesn't depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source."

The product will be free to get started, and in the current preview release apps will continue to be restricted to that free quota. Later this year, once the preview period has ended, developers can expect to pay:

- Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
- $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
- $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
- $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
- $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Google App Engine will provide two new APIs in the coming weeks. The image-manipulation API enables developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server, and the memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.

More information about Google App Engine is available at http://code.google.com/appengine/.