[nomilk]

Could you explain the steps you went through that led to you using BigQuery? The reason I ask is most of us probably use GCP and only ever interact with BigQuery via GCP. But it seems your entry point was a bit different to most (e.g. seems you might have clicked on a link to GCP from HTTP Archive, or perhaps something else?).

FWIW I use BigQuery a lot and as a rough guide I assume about 1c per GB scanned. So if I query a dataset that's 1TB, that's about $10. If the same data were stored on a relational db, the same query would take about a day (or at least a good part of a day). Because BigQuery returns a result so quickly (e.g. <1 minute) it can be easy to miss the insane amount of work it did to get there. So I could see someone accidentally putting that ~1min (but 1TB!) query into a loop or something, and boom, there's your $15k bill. Accidents happen.

Also FWIW, I've found although the big 3 cloud's pricing is tricky (since there are so many services), I find them much better than the PaaS built on top of the big 3 clouds. My suspicion is that the PaaS's have a strong incentive to obscure their pricing because customers can typically see what their costs are (e.g. if they buy some compute from AWS at $0.16/hr and sell it for $1.40/hr, that can be seen as a bit of a rip, hence they try to obscure it). But I think the big 3 are not too bad at this practice. It really bugs me when anyone deliberately obscures their prices, and it's often an indicator of more shady practices to come.