Speaking of the Google Prediction API: the company will start charging for the API, like good fortune teller should. According to its pricing page, the service will be free to users for six months or until the they reache a cap of 20,000 predictions – whichever comes first. Free accounts will also be limited to 100 queries and 5MB trained per day.
After the free period Google will charge:
- $10 monthly fee per project. A project is defined by a unique key on the Google APIs console.
- The monthly fee covers 10,000 additional predictions per month. Beyond that, predictions cost $0.50 per 1,000 predictions. If you intend to make more than 40,000 predictions per day, please contact us. Google Prediction has an absolute limit of 60,000 predictions per day.
- $0.002 per MB trained (maximum size of each dataset: 100MB)
The Prediction API gives developers access to Google’s own machine learning algorithms to analyze data and predict outcomes. I’m experiencing a bit of Deja Vu citing Pete Warden in our earlier article about BigQuery and Prediction API for the second time today:
There’s a lot of meat in the list of examples they give, a lot of hard-to-solve problems that would previously have required an internal engineering team to tackle,” he said. “Imagine being able to get sentiment-analysis on all your customer emails at the touch of a button […] or integrating product recommendations into your small e-commerce site with almost no engineering effort.
Frequent ReadWriteWeb commenter Ed Borasky called it in his comment on that older post:
It all depends on how they *price* it and who the competition is. I can’t imagine it’s going to be free, and I can’t imagine that other big players, like Microsoft, Wolfram, IBM, InfoChimps and Amazon, won’t form partnerships to compete in this arena. As long as it’s a “sole-source procurement” from Google, I’m not looking to spend any of *my* dollars here.
Photo by Jamie
