How Much Does BigQuery Cost?

BigQuery offers a choice of two pricing models for running queries:

• On-demand pricing: With this pricing model, you are charged for the number of bytes processed by each query. The first 1 TB of query data processed per month is free.
• Flat-rate pricing: With this pricing model, you purchase slots, which are virtual CPUs. When you buy slots, you are buying dedicated processing capacity that you can use to run queries. Slots are available in the following commitment plans:
• Flex slots: You commit to an initial 60 seconds.
• Monthly: You commit to an initial 30 days.
• Annual: You commit to 365 days.

With monthly and annual plans, you receive a lower price in exchange for a longer-term capacity commitment.

You can combine both models to fit your needs. With on-demand pricing, you pay for what you use. However, your queries run using a shared pool of slots, so performance can vary. With flat-rate pricing, you purchase guaranteed capacity, with a discounted price for a longer-term commitment.

Storage pricing is based on the amount of data stored in your tables. The size of the data is calculated based on the data types of the individual columns. For a detailed explanation of how data size is calculated, see Data size calculation.

Storage pricing is prorated per MB, per second. For example, if you store:

• 100 MB for half a month, you pay $0.001 (a tenth of a cent).
• 500 GB for half a month, you pay $5.
• 1 TB for a full month, you pay $20.

Storage usage is calculated in gibibytes (GiB), where 1 GiB is 230 bytes (1,024 MiB). Similarly, 1 tibibyte (TiB) is 240 bytes (1,024 GiB).

If a table is not edited for 90 consecutive days, it is billed at the long- term storage rate. There is no degradation of performance, durability, availability, or any other functionality when a table is considered long-term storage.

Each partition of a partitioned table is considered separately for long-term storage pricing. If a partition hasn’t been modified in the last 90 days, the data in that partition is considered long term storage and is charged at the discounted price.