Hacker News Reader

Comment by subbu | Hacker News Reader

no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email

Their free notification limit is quite generous.

No, they'll bill you the data (e.g. messages you post to topics) transferred in from this June, then your first hits will not be free anymore. To quote from the page:

Data Transfer In will be $0.10 per GB after June 30, 2010.

Seems generous to me even with that info. I don't know the packet size/charge per notification but I have trouble imagining the scenario in which one goes from 0 notifications (today), to using up 100,000 free notifications, and then to using up so many notifications you care/notice $0.10 per GB - all by June/July

Agreed! Strange though that Amazon doesn't heavily advertise how much of their developer-oriented services are actually free for people to 'kick the tires'.

It's even better than that:

  First 100,000 Amazon SNS API Requests *per month* are free

That was my first thought... Just like crack, the first hit is free

I think this technique is very effective at getting the "Hacker News" types to experiment with their service. I know I wouldn't have played with App Engine if Google didn't have a free offering at the low volume end.

It's no-minimum pricing that allows me to play without thinking too much about it first. Spending $2.63 for an afternoon of fiddling is close enough to free for my needs. I do agree that Google's AppEngine has benefited significantly by giving away enough power to run simple sites.

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