[olliej]

There's "scam" in the sense of "it didn't do what they said"/"charged me more than they said", and there's a more colloquial "scam" where the UI is designed to obscure the cost of a task (quintessential dark pattern stuff). I don't think the reporter is saying "they lied about big query", they're saying the UI is set up to make extremely expensive mistakes very easy, and it's set up to hide the actual cost of the query.

Estimating the total cost of a query is obviously fraught, but from the UI and other comments it sounds like BigQuery knows up front how much data a query will require, and there's at least a minimum cost per TB, so the UI could just say "this will cost at least $X" but the UI has a very basic "this will process X PB of data" text. So they're charging by TB but showing the usage in PB which is a) a 1000x smaller number, and b) visually similar to "TB".

It's very hard to see that as anything other than "design to obscure cost" given that there's no reason to not say "this will cost $X" when the cost is per TB, even if they don't the pricing is per TB but they're showing PB, the checkbox and the textual description are smaller that other text on the page, and there's no ability to specify a cost cap.