Blockchain developers are sharing "horror stories" related to eye-watering bills received from Google Cloud's BigQuery service, including a developer who was suddenly charged a total of $15,000 for performing three queries.

BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse offered by Google Cloud, designed for analyzing large sets of data via Structured Query Language (SQL) with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

“I want to warn everyone that BigQuery is a big scam and every day you’re risking getting a ridiculous bill that can bankrupt you,” wrote a pseudonymous developer in a post shared by Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of decentralized algorithmic trading protocol Trading Strategy, adding:

“Each month, my bill is usually a few hundred. This month I got a bill for $18k.”

“Turns out I did 3 bigquery searches on Solana with limits in the query, and each one cost over $5k,” wrote the developer, adding that after complaining to Google support, the charges were reduced to $4k per query.

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Multiple other crypto industry participants joined in, alleging predatory pricing mechanisms that don't allow the setting of monthly limits.

“They intentionally don't let you set hard stops,” responded Ermin Nurovic, co-founder of Flat Money synthetic dollar protocol, adding, “Your Google Cloud function got stuck in a recursive loop costing you thousands? Too bad.”

Solana integrated with Google Cloud’s BigQuery in October 2023, allowing users to query Solana blockchain data, such as whale transactions or NFT sales, through Google Cloud’s program, providing developers more transparent access to archived blockchain data via BigQuery analytics.

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Second developer “horror story” emerges with another $5K charge

Adding to the concerns around the service’s billing mechanisms, a second pseudonymous developer emerged, who was charged $5,000 for “one query select from a Solana table,” which “accidentally” scanned multiple terrabytes of data.

“Thankfully that time, our company was connected to Google locally, which helped us escalate the issue and refunded us,” wrote the developer in the post shared by Ohtamaa.

Since the billing incident, the developer has never queried “any blockchain data in BigQuery without checking the partitions first.”

The developer added that this pricing model makes it unimaginable for AI algorithms to rely on BigQuery services.

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