Pricing

BigQuery offers scalable, flexible pricing options to help fit your project and budget. BigQuery charges for data storage, streaming inserts, and for querying data, but loading and exporting data are free of charge.

BigQuery provides cost control mechanisms that enable you to cap your daily costs to an amount that you choose. For more information, see Cost Controls.

When charging in local currency, Google will convert the prices listed into applicable local currency pursuant to the conversion rates published by leading financial institutions.

The following table summarizes BigQuery pricing. BigQuery's quota policy applies for these operations.

Free operations

The following table shows BigQuery operations that are free of charge. BigQuery's quota policy applies for these operations.

Storage pricing

Loading data into BigQuery is free, with the exception of a small charge for streamed data. Storage pricing is based on the amount of data stored in your tables, which we calculate based on the types of data you store. For a detailed explanation of how we calculate your data size, see data size calculation.

Storage pricing is prorated per MB, per second. For example, if you store:

• 100 MB for half a month, you pay $0.001 (a tenth of a cent)
• 500 GB for half a month, you pay $5
• 1 TB for a full month, you pay $20

Long term storage pricing

If a table is not edited for 90 consecutive days, the price of storage for that table automatically drops by 50 percent to $0.01 per GB per month.

There is no degradation of performance, durability, availability, or any other functionality when a table is considered long term storage.

If the table is edited, the price reverts back to the regular storage pricing of $0.02 per GB per month, and the 90-day timer starts counting from zero.

Anything that modifies the data in a table resets the timer (load, copy to, query with destination table):

All other actions do NOT reset the timer, including:

• Query from
• Create view
• Export
• Copy from
• Patch

For tables that reach the 90-day threshold during a billing cycle, the price is prorated accordingly.

Long term storage pricing applies only to BigQuery storage, not to external data sources.

Query pricing

Query pricing refers to the cost of running your SQL commands and user-defined functions. BigQuery charges for queries by using one metric: the number of bytes processed. You are charged for the number of bytes processed whether the data is stored in BigQuery or in an external data source such as Google Drive or Google Cloud Storage.

Free Tier pricing

The first 1 TB of data processed per month is free of charge (per billing account).

On-demand pricing

Beyond your first 1 TB of data processed in a month, you are charged as follows:

• You aren't charged for queries that return an error, or for cached queries.
• Charges are rounded to the nearest MB, with a minimum 10 MB data processed per table referenced by the query, and with a minimum 10 MB data processed per query.
• Cancelling a running query job may incur charges up to the full cost for the query were it allowed to run to completion.
• BigQuery uses a columnar data structure. You're charged according to the total data processed in the columns you select, and the total data per column is calculated based on the types of data in the column. For more information about how we calculate your data size, see data size calculation.
• If you prefer a stable monthly cost rather than paying the on-demand price, see Flat-rate pricing.

Flat-rate pricing

BigQuery offers flat-rate pricing for high-volume or enterprise customers who prefer a stable monthly cost for queries rather than paying the on-demand price per TB of data processed. If you choose flat-rate pricing, the cost of all bytes processed is included in the monthly flat-rate price.

BigQuery automatically manages your slots quota based on customer history, usage, and spend. For customers with at least $10,000 in monthly analytics spend BigQuery offers several ways to increase the number of allocated slots.

Flat-rate pricing:

• Applies only to query costs, not for storage. See Storage pricing for storage costs.
• Applies to your entire billing account.
• Provides additional BigQuery slots. See the following table for details.
• Provides additional query concurrency for interactive queries.
• Includes high-compute queries; the cost is included in your monthly flat-rate price.

Contact your sales representative if you are interested in flat-rate pricing.

High-Compute queries

High-Compute queries are queries that consume extraordinarily large computing resources relative to the number of bytes processed. Typically, such queries contain a very large number of JOIN or CROSS JOIN clauses or complex User-defined Functions. In order to run these queries, you need to explicitly opt in.

How to opt in

If your query is too compute intensive for BigQuery to complete at the standard $5 per TB pricing tier, BigQuery returns a billingTierLimitExceeded error and an estimate of how much the query would cost.

To run the query at a higher pricing tier, pass a new value for maximumBillingTier as part of the query request. The maximumBillingTier is a positive integer that serves as a multiplier of the basic price of $5 per TB. For example, if you set maximumBillingTier to 2, the maximum cost for that query will be $10 per TB.

"query": {
  "query": "select count(*) from publicdata:samples.shakespeare",
  ...
  "maximumBillingTier": "2"
},

bq query --maximum_billing_tier 2 'select count(*) from publicdata:samples.shakespeare'

Exercise caution when setting maximumBillingTier because there is no upper limit to the value that you can set. Keeping the value low can help control costs by preventing highly compute-intensive queries from completing. To further help you control your costs, BigQuery offers custom quotas, which can help mitigate the risk of runaway expenses. For more information, see Cost Controls.

Alternatively, you can request a project-wide default value by submitting the BigQuery High-Compute queries form. You can also use the form to disable the per-query override for your project.

Data size calculation

When you load data into BigQuery or query the data, you're charged according to the data size. We calculate your data size based on the size of each data type.

Null values for any data type are calculated as 0 bytes. Repeated fields are calculated per entry. For example, a repeated INTEGER with 4 entries counts as 32 bytes.

Sample query costs for on-demand pricing

When you run a query, you're charged according to the total data processed in the columns you select, even if you set an explicit LIMIT on the results. The total bytes per column is calculated based on the types of data in the column. For more information about how we calculate your data size, see data size calculation.

The following table shows several sample queries and a description of how many bytes are processed for each query.

SELECT
  corpus,
  word
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare
LIMIT 1;

SELECT
  corpus
FROM
  (SELECT
     *
   FROM
     publicdata:samples.shakespeare);

SELECT
  COUNT(*)
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare;

SELECT
  COUNT(corpus)
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare;

SELECT
  COUNT(*)
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare
WHERE
  corpus = 'hamlet';

SELECT
  shakes.corpus,
  wiki.language
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare AS shakes
  JOIN EACH
  publicdata:samples.wikipedia AS wiki
  ON shakes.corpus = wiki.title;