Blockchain developers are sharing alarming experiences regarding exorbitant bills from Google Cloud’s BigQuery service, including one developer who received a shocking $15,000 charge for just three queries.
BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse from Google Cloud, is designed to analyze large datasets using Structured Query Language (SQL), incorporating built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
“I want to caution everyone that BigQuery is essentially a scam, and every day you risk receiving an outrageous bill that could financially ruin you,” stated a pseudonymous developer in a post shared by Mikko Ohtamaa, the co-founder of the decentralized algorithmic trading protocol Trading Strategy, adding:
“Usually, my monthly bill is a few hundred. This month, however, I received a bill for $18k.”
“It turns out I performed three BigQuery searches on Solana with limits, and each one cost over $5k,” the developer explained, noting that after reaching out to Google support, the charges were adjusted to $4k per query.
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Numerous other participants from the crypto industry echoed these concerns, claiming predatory pricing strategies that prevent users from setting monthly caps.
“They deliberately don’t allow you to set hard stops,” responded Ermin Nurovic, co-founder of the Flat Money synthetic dollar protocol, adding, “If your Google Cloud function gets stuck in a recursive loop costing you thousands, that’s too bad.”
Solana integrated with Google Cloud’s BigQuery in October 2023, enabling users to query Solana blockchain data, such as whale transactions or NFT sales, through Google Cloud’s program, providing developers with clearer access to archived blockchain data via BigQuery analytics.
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Another developer recounts “horror story” with a $5K charge
Further raising concerns about the service’s billing practices, a second pseudonymous developer reported being charged $5,000 for a “one query select from a Solana table,” which “accidentally” scanned multiple terabytes of data.
“Fortunately, this time, our company had a local connection to Google, which helped us escalate the issue and receive a refund,” the developer noted in a post shared by Ohtamaa.
Since this billing incident, the developer has ensured they do not query “any blockchain data in BigQuery without checking the partitions first.”
They further pointed out that this pricing model makes it impractical for AI algorithms to depend on BigQuery services.
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