# Google BigQuery

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/data-warehouse/bigquery/

A serverless analytical warehouse billed on bytes scanned, with storage priced separately by the gibibyte-hour.

## Who it suits

Queries that are occasional or selective. Nothing is provisioned, the first tebibyte scanned each month is free, and a workload that runs twice a week costs nothing between runs — the only member here where a small warehouse genuinely bills zero.

Consider something else if Your queries scan more than they return. Billing is on bytes READ, not rows produced, so $6.25 per tebibyte is a tax on unselective SQL and a dashboard refreshing every minute against a wide table is the expensive shape.

## iScore

88 / 100 (80% interval 83–92), rank 1 of 4 in data-warehouse — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every data-warehouse peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/data-warehouse/bigquery/alternatives/

- Price: 83 (76–89), weight 71%, 1 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_offer_type, minimum_paid_price
- Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 29%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- What the free plan includes: 1 tebibyte of query data processed a month and 10 gibibytes of storage, both renewing monthly rather than expiring. The only standing free allowance of the four — the others offer a trial or a credit. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: Nothing until the second tebibyte. Queries are $6.25 per tebibyte scanned above the free tier, with no cluster, node or plan fee underneath — the only member here where a small workload genuinely costs zero. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Two compute models. On-demand bills the bytes each query processes, at $6.25 per tebibyte. Capacity bills slot-hours — reserved virtual CPUs — regardless of what the queries read. The first model punishes unselective queries and the second punishes idle capacity, and the choice is made per account rather than per query. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

### Storage

- Storage price: $0.000031507 per gibibyte-hour for active logical storage and $0.000021918 for long-term, with the first 10 GiB free each month. Quoted hourly to nine decimal places; the page does not convert it to a monthly figure and neither does this record. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

### Observability

- Query price: $6.25 per tebibyte of data processed, after the first tebibyte each month. Charged on bytes READ, not rows returned, so the cost of a query is a property of the table scan rather than the result. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Google BigQuery vs Amazon Redshift](https://inetgeek.com/compare/bigquery-vs-aws-redshift/)
- [Google BigQuery vs ClickHouse Cloud](https://inetgeek.com/compare/bigquery-vs-clickhouse-cloud/)
- [Google BigQuery vs MotherDuck](https://inetgeek.com/compare/bigquery-vs-motherduck/)