BigQuery is serverless and fully managed; it is also one of the most cost-effective offerings of GCP. This is probably also because BigQuery is often the first GCP service that prospective customers try out and getting the pricing on this right is very important to drive adoption.
Pricing details change pretty quickly, and the information here is current as of March 2018. Despite the ever-changing nature of cloud pricing, we have chosen to include this, because it shows, broadly, how BigQuery is priced and why it is such a cost-effective competitor in the data warehousing space.
|
Action |
Cost |
|
Storage |
$0.02/GB/month (first 10 GB/month free) |
|
Long-term storage (no edits for 90 days) |
$0.01/GB/month (first 10 GB/month free) |
|
Queries |
$5/TB (first 1 TB/month is free) |
|
Flat-rate for 2,000 slots |
$40,000/month |
|
Loading data |
Free |
|
Copying data |
Free |
|
Exporting data |
Free |
|
Streaming Inserts |
$0.01 for 200 MB |
A few points worth calling out on the pricing:
- Notice the very generous free tier on the important aspects of storage and querying
- There are also flat-rate pricing plans for heavy users, where you effectively pay $40,000 per month and that's it
- Storage works out similar in pricing to regional buckets (~2 cents/GB/month), but if you leave the data in there, it quickly gets considered as long-term storage, and the pricing becomes more like nearline storage (~1 cents/GB/month)
- BigQuery also supports streaming ingestion at a very fast throughput (you can stream data in at about 100,000 events/second), but streaming is relatively expensive.