BigQuery’s Ridiculous Pricing Model Cost Us $10,000 in Just 22 Seconds!

Yes, you read that right. $10,000 burned in less than half a minute. Not because of inefficient queries. Not because of high compute usage. But because of a completely absurd pricing model that most engineers don’t even realize exists. If you use BigQuery, there’s a good chance you’re bleeding money without knowing it. The Setup: A Simple Query — Or So We Thought Last month, we were helping a customer build a data pipeline. Nothing complicated — just a basic data sampling task from a large public table. Given the dataset’s size, we took precautions: Used a LIMIT statement to restrict the result to 100K rows Query executed instantly—nothing seemed off Ran the query three times The detailed query is: EXPORT DATA OPTIONS ( uri = 'gs://xxxxx/.json', format = 'JSON', overwrite = true) AS ( SELECT FROM `bigquery-public-data.crypto_solana_xxxxx.Instructions` LIMIT 1000000 ); This query exports 1,000,000 rows from the Instructions table in the crypto_solana dataset (hosted in BigQuery's public datasets) to a Google Cloud Storage bucket in JSON format. The invoice arrived: $9,847.24 for Three Queries?!

Mar 26, 2025 - 15:21

BigQuery’s Ridiculous Pricing Model Cost Us $10,000 in Just 22 Seconds!

Yes, you read that right. $10,000 burned in less than half a minute.

Not because of inefficient queries. Not because of high compute usage. But because of a completely absurd pricing model that most engineers don’t even realize exists.

If you use BigQuery, there’s a good chance you’re bleeding money without knowing it.

The Setup: A Simple Query — Or So We Thought

Last month, we were helping a customer build a data pipeline. Nothing complicated — just a basic data sampling task from a large public table. Given the dataset’s size, we took precautions:

Used a LIMIT statement to restrict the result to 100K rows
Query executed instantly—nothing seemed off
Ran the query three times

The detailed query is:

EXPORT DATA
OPTIONS (
    uri = 'gs://xxxxx/*.json',
    format = 'JSON',
    overwrite = true)
AS (
    SELECT *
    FROM `bigquery-public-data.crypto_solana_xxxxx.Instructions`
    LIMIT 1000000
);

This query exports 1,000,000 rows from the Instructions table in the crypto_solana dataset (hosted in BigQuery's public datasets) to a Google Cloud Storage bucket in JSON format.