AppFog PaaS Bases Pricing Structure on RAM Usage

AppFog has completed the beta testing of its eponymous platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which provides customers and partners with a cloud-based application deployment and management platform that AppFog claims is priced simpler than competing services.

The pricing structure, quite simply, is based on the amount of RAM a customer needs. Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson compared the PaaS market to the early days of Hotmail. Remember those days? Storage restrictions, plenty of competitors and not exactly the most streamlined interface. Well, Carlson said, that’s the market right now, with PaaS providers “giving the equivalent of 15MB of space to run apps.”

AppFog is positioning itself as the next generation — the Gmail to early Hotmail, in respects. To give its competitors a run for their money, the company promises 2GB of RAM for free to customers. After that, monthly plans are available — 4GB for $100, 16GB for $380 and 32GB for $720. For customers requiring RAM measuring in terabytes, AppFog’s pricing is $22.50 per gigabyte.

Earlier this year, Talkin’ Cloud identified Carlson as one of five cloud computing services experts to watch, noting the CEO’s success in getting AppFog into the toolbox of more than 10,000 developers.

AppFog’s PaaS is one of those services that is more of a “sell to” than “sell through” product for the channel. Dubbed a PaaS for hackers, the company Carlson built seems to be aiming its product at a certain segment of the techie market. AppFog provides “simple PaaS” for Java, Python, Node, .Net, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Mongo, PostgreSQL and others, according to the company website.

Built on a claim to provide the most affordable and simplest pricing, AppFog should play an important role in the PaaS market going forward. Time, however, will tell.