Blockchain developers are recounting “horror stories” about staggering bills from Google Cloud’s BigQuery service, including one developer who faced a shocking charge of $15,000 for just three queries.
BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse provided by Google Cloud, designed for analyzing extensive data sets using Structured Query Language (SQL) and integrated artificial intelligence (AI) features.
“I want to caution everyone that BigQuery is a significant scam, and daily you risk receiving a ludicrous bill that could lead to bankruptcy,” wrote a pseudonymous developer in a post shared by Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of the decentralized algorithmic trading protocol Trading Strategy, adding:
“Typically, my monthly bill is a few hundred. This month, I received an $18k bill.”
“I realized I executed 3 BigQuery searches on Solana with limitations in the query, and each one cost over $5k,” the developer explained, noting that after raising the issue with Google support, the charges were lowered to $4k per query.
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Other participants in the crypto industry also reported similar concerns, alleging predatory pricing models that do not permit setting monthly limits.
“They intentionally do not allow you to set hard limits,” responded Ermin Nurovic, co-founder of the Flat Money synthetic dollar protocol, adding, “Did your Google Cloud function get stuck in a recursive loop costing you thousands? Tough luck.”
Solana partnered 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 platform, thereby offering developers clearer access to historical blockchain data via BigQuery analytics.
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A second developer’s “horror story” with another $5K bill
Adding to the alarm regarding the service’s billing practices, another pseudonymous developer surfaced, who was charged $5,000 for “one query select from a Solana table,” which “accidentally” scanned multiple terabytes of data.
“Fortunately, that time our company was connected to Google locally, which allowed us to escalate the matter and receive a refund,” the developer wrote in a post shared by Ohtamaa.
Since the billing incident, the developer has always checked “the partitions first” before querying any blockchain data in BigQuery.
The developer also remarked that this pricing model makes it impractical for AI algorithms to depend on BigQuery services.
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