Google App Engine
Shares rank 5 of 7 platform as a services by recommenders
Recommended for being ahead of its time, stable, and easy to deploy with a good free tier; the most common caveat is cost.
Recommended for being ahead of its time, stable, and easy to deploy with a good free tier; the most common caveat is cost.
18 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 61%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Ahead of its time for cloud
“I meant in terms of going from "0 to Cloud", GAE was ahead of its time.”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “App Engine was good for its time”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Gemini 4 Carbon” “which was hugely under-appreciated at the time”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “An Update on Heroku” Free tier and easy hosting
“Back then GAE has a really good free tier, so I used it”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Python Workers are now generally available” “free and easy modern hosting”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Before GitHub” Stable and long-lived
“App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable.”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff” “Even app engine (2008) is still kicking.”
Comment from 8 Jun 2026 in “Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive, billed by instance hours
“Google AppEngine moved from charging based on usage to charging based on instance hours”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Skip Is Now Free and Open Source” “Kubernetes, app engine, beanstalk all are huge money sink”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year” “App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable.”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff” Breaking changes and upkeep
“Annual exercise to keep them alive (even if no action is needed in the end) is of similar complexity.”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration” “How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “The Jeff Dean Facts”
Other platform as a services people recommend
The four most recommended other platform as a services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 7 platform as a services, rankedWhat people said
17 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“App Engine was good for its time”
“on Google App Engine, for years when you ran a deploy it would create a VM just to run a single container”
“Back then GAE has a really good free tier, so I used it”
“GAE autoscaler did not reassign a request that triggered a new instance, waiting for it to start for 20s even though all requests completed within 200ms”
“I watched an org get burned by Google App Engine.”
“Even app engine (2008) is still kicking.”
“they would even call us when we caused all their pagers to go off”
“free and easy modern hosting”
“Kubernetes, app engine, beanstalk all are huge money sink”
“which was hugely under-appreciated at the time”
“Google AppEngine moved from charging based on usage to charging based on instance hours”
“How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...”
“App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable.”
“Annual exercise to keep them alive (even if no action is needed in the end) is of similar complexity.”
“One queuing system I miss is the old Google App Engine one”
“If you use GCP app engine nothing exactly like it exists in AWS”
“I meant in terms of going from "0 to Cloud", GAE was ahead of its time.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.