It's FREE until you get traction, and then you just need to know how to use it efficiently. It's a tradeoff, like many things - put in more effort to understand the animal, never have to fiddle with the server, never have to hire ops people.
Most of the complaints about pricing were fixed when users looked more carefully at their code. For some it's not worth it to do so, but that's not Google's fault. And before that, their inefficient code was costing Google money. You'd have done the same thing.
Controversial? That is an interesting word choice. I've heard some describe it as expensive, but what is the controversy surrounding how they have modeled their prices?
I think they're getting at the way Google hiked their prices which resulted in some peoples bills rising by a factor of 100. GAE has every right to make money - it was the speed and direction of the change which caused 'controversy'.
