Reviving what App Engine got right
Google App Engine's Search and Channel APIs were quietly excellent. When they were retired, a generation of apps lost capabilities that were hard to replace. altengine exists to bring them back.
The gap we're filling
For years, App Engine gave developers two things that were genuinely difficult to build yourself: a managed full-text Search API, and a realtime Channel API for pushing messages to clients. They were simple, well-documented, and priced for small apps. Then they were deprecated, and the recommended replacements were heavier, pricier, or simply different.
altengine is a faithful revival. We treat parity with the original APIs as a contract: if your code worked against App Engine's Search or Channel service, moving to altengine should be a change of base URL and credentials — not a rewrite.
What we're building
- Search API — structured documents, a query language faithful to the original, facets, sorting, and pagination.
- Channel API — subscribe-only client sockets (one socket carries many channels), HTTP publish, and fan-out to subscribers.
These are the first two services, not the ceiling. altengine starts by reviving App Engine's retired APIs, but it isn't limited to them — the platform is built to grow into new managed services too. We add them as demand shows up, so if there's a capability you'd run, tell us and it helps us prioritize.
Principles
Parity is the contract. The developer-facing behavior stays faithful to what App Engine offered, so moving over is a change of base URL and credentials, not a rewrite.
Affordable by default. Managed search has usually meant paying for a cluster — provisioned nodes you're billed for even when they sit idle — or a hosted service whose price climbs steeply once you pass a thousand documents. altengine has no cluster to keep running. You're billed for the storage your documents and index use, plus the searches you run — so an index you aren't querying costs only its storage.
The first dollar is free. There's one plan — pay-as-you-go — and the first $1 of usage each month is on us. Most side projects never pay a cent, and idle resources cost effectively nothing.
Secure by construction. Short-lived, per-instance signed tokens and least-privilege, org-scoped grants are part of the model — not an add-on.
Who it's for
Teams migrating off legacy App Engine, developers who miss a search or realtime service that just works, and anyone who wants managed capabilities without managing a cluster or a five-figure invoice.