Pricing in the standard environment

As with other services on Google Cloud, App Engine billing is calculated based on resources used. The primary component for billing in the App Engine standard environment is instance hours, or the number of hours a given instance is running times the hourly rate for the given instance.

As shown in preceding diagram, each instance class has a specific instance hour billing rate. These rates are calculated as multiples of the base F1 or B1 instance hour rate. For example, an F2 instance is charged for two instance hours per hour of operation, and an F4 instance is charged four instance hours per hour of operation. Pricing per instance hour varies between regions, and rates will change over time. Disabled services and services with basic scaling that are scaled down to zero do not incur instance hours.

Aside from instance hours, billable resources can be divided into App Engine-specific resources and general Google Cloud resources. App Engine-specific resources include network bandwidth usage, Memcache, and task queue stored data/blobstore. As with instance hours, these prices vary between regions. Other resources such as datastore and Cloud Storage are billed based on the standard billing structures for those services.

Google Cloud provides a free tier for App Engine standard environment resources, as well as most other services that App Engine supports. For compute resources, the first 28 instance hours per day are free. For networking, all inbound traffic is free, as is the first 1 GB of outbound requests per day. When a resource exceeds the free tier limit, the standard billing rate applies to the amount of that resource consumed over the free tier. For example, if services consume 50 instance hours in a day, the resulting charge will be for 22 instance hours.