16.4. BigQuery Pricing Explained

Understanding the cost of using BigQuery is essential for managing your budget and ensuring you're getting the most out of your data analysis. Let's break down the pricing structure.

Storage Pricing

BigQuery offers two different pricing models: storage and analysis. For storage, you pay $0.02 per gigabyte per month, with a 50% discount if you keep the data for more than three months. Plus, you get the first 10 gigabytes per month free.

10 gigabytes of text and tables is quite a lot, so if all your stored data is under this threshold, you won't pay for storage.

Analysis Pricing

For analysis, it's $5 per terabyte of query data processed. If you run a query that processes a terabyte of data (100 times a 10-gigabyte table), you'll pay $5 for that query. The first terabyte per month of analysis and processing is also free.

To put it into perspective: if you have a 10-gigabyte table and query it 100 times per month (or about three times a day), it's entirely free.

To give an example, consider Google Analytics 4 event data for Google Merchandise Store—a high-traffic website with publicly accessible BigQuery dataset—for 90 days; it comes in at less than four gigabytes in size.

Businesses or sites with more traffic or larger datasets should be comfortable paying just 2 cents per gigabyte to store their data while retaining ownership.

Now that we've covered pricing let's discuss how fast BigQuery processes queries in Looker Studio.