Google's cloud-based application platform, AppEngine, has been in testing with free, but limited, instances available to developers to get a feel for the service and its capabilities for nearly a year now. Yesterday, Google announced the lifting of those built-in account limits and the final pricing plan for production service.

New accounts, with slightly lower storage and processing limits, will remain free, a boon to startups and organizations looking to dip their toes in without significant commitments. Accounts wishing to exceed those limitations on the free service will be able to do so, at rates which are (as expected) slightly lower than those of major competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS): $.10 per CPU core hour and GB of bandwidth, and $.15 per GB of stored data.

More interesting is the billing model, which seems to mimic the popular AdWords billing... the developer can set his or her own quotas for utilization, to effectively cap their expenses to a set limit per day. This is a great feature for startups, who with more traditional pay-as-you-go models such as that of AWS risk being overwhelmed by sudden bursts of traffic... victims of their own success.

More information can be found in Google's blog post announcement.