App Engine, revived

The Search & Channel APIs from App Engine — back, and better.

When Google retired App Engine's legacy Search and Channel APIs, the apps that relied on them were left stranded. altengine brings them back as clean, drop-in cloud services — with a modern runtime and pricing that starts under a dollar.

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No credit card to start · Free tier on every service · Familiar API contracts

search — index a product

PUT /v1/search/my-shop/indexes/products/documents

{ "documents": [{
  "id": "sku-1024",
  "fields": [
    { "name": "title", "type": "text",   "value": "Trailhead Jacket" },
    { "name": "price", "type": "number", "value": 129 }
  ],
  "facets": [
    { "name": "tags", "type": "atom", "value": "outdoor" }
  ]
}] }

Two services, day one

Everything the old runtime gave you — nothing it didn't

altengine launches with faithful revivals of the two most-missed App Engine APIs. Same shapes, same concepts, brought to a runtime built for today.

Search API

Full-text search that just indexes and queries

Create an index, put documents in, run queries with the operators you already know. Fielded search, facets, sorting, and pagination — without standing up a search cluster.

Structured documents with text, atom, number, and date fields
A query language faithful to App Engine's Search syntax
Facets, ranking, sorting, and pagination out of the box
No cluster to provision — pay for storage and queries, nothing while idle

POST /v1/search/my-shop/indexes/products/search

{ "query": "title:jacket AND price < 150",
  "facets": ["tags"],
  "sort": [{ "expr": "price" }],
  "limit": 20 }

Channel API

Realtime channels over a single WebSocket

Publish from your backend over plain HTTP; clients subscribe over a single WebSocket that can carry many channels at once. Fan-out is handled for you, and you're billed on message deliveries and connection time.

Subscribe-only client sockets with short-lived, channel-scoped tokens
HTTP publish from anywhere, fan-out to every subscriber
One WebSocket carries many channels, with a ready-to-use subscribe URL
Billed on message deliveries and connection time — nobody connected, no charge

POST /v1/channel/my-shop/publish

{ "channel": "orders",
  "data": { "id": "sku-1024", "status": "shipped" } }

Why altengine

Built to be boring in all the right ways

Drop-in parity

The API contracts mirror App Engine's originals, so migrating is mostly a base-URL and credentials change — not a rewrite.

Fast & frugal

Quick to respond and easy on the bill — there's no always-on cluster, so an index you aren't querying costs only its storage.

First dollar free

The first $1 of usage every month is free, across all services. Most side projects never pay a cent.

One org, many keys

Organization-level API keys with scoped grants. Search and Channel today, with more managed services to come — added as demand grows, not just App Engine revivals.

Secure by default

Short-lived tokens, per-instance signing, and least-privilege grants baked into the model, not bolted on.

Transparent usage

A live console shows exactly what you've used and what it costs — no mystery line items at month's end.

Bring your app back to life

Spin up a Search index or a realtime Channel in minutes. Start on the free tier and grow into pricing that stays honest.

Open the console