Let me clarify, my comment was in regards to personal exploration and nothing beyond that. Most add-ons have a basic, very limited, free option. The same goes for the pricing on Heroku's platform. If you're rockin' an app that needs to be production scale, baseline won't cut it on Heroku; frankly, you get what you pay for so I don't expect it to be free.

Point for point, GAE's baseline quotas are obviously better but it's not an apples to apples comparison in my opinion.