For me, as a potential user of GAE for a personal side project, I am already paying $9/mo (let's assume) for my standard shared hosting with shell access. Now,

For me, as a potential user of GAE for a personal side project, I am already paying $9/mo (let's assume) for my standard shared hosting with shell access. Now, I want to try out GAE. I do so with local / dev appserver and free junk until I get things kind of working and start getting traffic / traction. I guess the ~good~ point to all this is that if you are going over the free limit (ie: start getting serious traffic) what el goog wants you to do is put on adwords, earn $9/mo and then turn right around and give it back to them for "hosting costs". Really it just leaves a huge sour taste in people's mouth that this is such a dramatic (and un-warned!) change in pricing for really a monopoly service. Assume that you were heavily invested in GAE / DataStore and have... ohh... 1tb of data or something with them. Where / how else are you going to solve these "impossible" problems that the datastore solves for you? Much better to not get tied down with google's quirky (yet scalable) model in the first place so at least you have the ability to move between competitive providers instead of getting stuck with a monopoly provider that doesn't know how (socially) to charge people for services.