GAE Terms of Service Regarding Multiple Applications

Question

4.4. You may not develop multiple Applications to simulate or act as a single Application or otherwise access the Service in a manner intended to avoid incurring fees.

That's what GAE's ToS says here. My question is, would I be violating this by having my blogs, forums and etc. hosted as separate apps and putting them all on subdomains e.g. blog.domain.com, forums.domain.com?

I hope that this term only intends to prevent people from splitting up a single application e.g. a forum into more than one app, rather that covering apps with different functionality which are to be hosted on the same domain.

Answer 1

If these applications have no interaction, then I would define them as separate applications and permissible within the ToS.

To be sure, post a message to the app engine google group and an app engine team member might give you some guidance.

Answer 2

I think the main clue here is, "or otherwise access the Service in a manner intended to avoid incurring fees".

If your blog+forums would exceed the free quotas as a single app, but each remains within the free quotas as separate apps, then you might find yourself having to answer questions if Google decides they "act as a single app". If they would be within the free quotas even combined, the choice of words strongly suggests to me that Google doesn't care how many apps they're divided into.

Taking another example, a blog and a comment system could be separate components, hence arguably "separate webapps". Indeed you can embed external comment services in your statically-served blog using AJAX to pull everything together on a single page. But in my view if that isn't "acting as a single Application", nothing is. So I'd guess that example would be problematic if it resulted in reduced fees.

If your blog and forums are only related in the sense that you own them both, and they maybe concern the same subject, then surely those are separate apps (albeit on the same domain). If nothing else, it's architecturally dodgy to expect to have to combine a blog and a forums system into a single software program.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and I'm certainly not either your lawyer or Google's lawyer ;-) I strongly suspect though that this clause is there to stop you having 10 GAE apps all sending out emails on behalf of your one public-facing app, it's not there to stop you running multiple vaguely-related apps off subdomains of a single domain.