BigQuery costs
Resource Details
How much data do you plan to scan/read using BigQuery in a month?
Estimate of data in Active storage:
Estimate of data in Long-term storage:
Estimation
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PRICING MODEL
How BigQuery pricing works
BigQuery separates the cost of analysis from the cost of storage, and the two behave very differently. Analysis can be bought on demand, where you pay for each terabyte of data your queries scan, or through capacity pricing, where you reserve slots and pay for processing time regardless of bytes read. On-demand suits spiky, unpredictable exploration; capacity pricing becomes cheaper once query volume is steady and high enough to keep reserved slots busy.
Storage is billed per gigabyte and splits into active and long-term tiers. A table or partition that has not been modified for ninety consecutive days moves to long-term storage automatically at roughly half the price, with no change in performance or availability. Because on-demand queries are priced on bytes scanned, partitioning, clustering, and selecting only the columns you need reduce cost far more than query tuning alone. A monthly free tier covers a limited amount of both storage and query scanning.
What drives your BigQuery bill
Bytes scanned
On-demand queries are priced on the data a query reads, not the rows it returns. SELECT * across a wide table is the most common source of unexpected BigQuery cost.
Pricing model
On-demand bills per terabyte scanned. Capacity pricing reserves slots by the hour under the Standard, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus editions and decouples cost from scan volume entirely.
Active vs long-term storage
Data untouched for ninety days drops to long-term storage automatically at about half the active rate. Any modification to the table or partition resets that clock.
Partitioning and clustering
Partitioned and clustered tables let BigQuery skip blocks entirely, which reduces bytes scanned and therefore directly reduces on-demand query cost.
Streaming and extras
Streaming inserts are billed per gigabyte ingested, while batch loads are free. BI Engine reservations and cross-region data transfer are separate line items again.
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