Blockchain developers are recounting “horror stories” about staggering bills from Google Cloud’s BigQuery service, including one case where a developer was unexpectedly charged $15,000 for just three queries.
BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse provided by Google Cloud, aimed at analyzing large data sets using Structured Query Language (SQL) and enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) features.
“I want to caution everyone that BigQuery is a major scam, and you’re risking catastrophic bills that could bankrupt you every day,” stated a pseudonymous developer in a post shared by Mikko Ohtamaa, the co-founder of decentralized algorithmic trading protocol Trading Strategy. The developer continued:
“Usually, my bill is a few hundred a month. But this month, it hit $18k.”
“I found that I had performed three BigQuery searches on Solana with specific limits, and each one cost over $5k,” the developer reported, noting that after reaching out to Google support, the charges were adjusted to $4k per query.
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Many others in the crypto industry have echoed concerns about perceived predatory pricing strategies that prevent users from setting monthly spending limits.
“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? Too bad.”
In October 2023, Solana integrated with Google Cloud’s BigQuery, allowing users to analyze Solana blockchain data, such as whale transactions or NFT sales, through Google Cloud’s platform, thereby granting developers clearer access to archived blockchain data via BigQuery analytics.
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Another developer’s “horror story” surfaces with a $5K charge
Moreover, concerns over the billing practices of the service were heightened by a second pseudonymous developer who reported a $5,000 charge for “one query select from a Solana table,” which “accidentally” scanned several terabytes of data.
“Fortunately, our company was connected to Google locally, which enabled us to escalate the issue and secure a refund,” the developer shared in a post shared by Ohtamaa.
Since this billing incident, the developer has been cautious, always checking the partitions before querying “any blockchain data in BigQuery.”
They added that this pricing model makes it impractical for AI algorithms to depend on BigQuery services.
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