25.08.2025
2 min
544
Blockchain developers claim that Google Cloud BigQuery is charging them over $5,000 per query, forcing them to leave the platform and calling it a “scam trap” for those who don’t know the details of how the service works.
The story came to light after Trading Strategy co-founder Mikko Ohtamaa published a complaint from an anonymous developer. The developer explained that his monthly expenses were usually a few hundred dollars, but in August he received a bill for $18,000. The reason was three requests for Solana blockchain data, each of which cost more than $5,000. After the complaint, Google agreed to reduce the amount to $4,000 “one-time”, but the developer decided to leave the cloud service for good.
BigQuery is an analytical data center from Google Cloud, which is positioned as a tool for working with large data sets. In October 2023, Solana blockchain data was added there to allow developers to receive statistics on transactions and wallets faster. At the same time, inattention to the features of the service led to a scandal: costs in the thousands of dollars for a single query came as a surprise to those who were used to paying hundreds.
Other community members also said they had encountered similar problems: one received a refund thanks to local Google support, another noted that after penalty bills he learned to use data partitioning. The problem is that by default BigQuery processes the entire table, not just a part of it, which leads to huge amounts of calculations and, accordingly, high bills.
Some developers emphasize that with the correct use of partitions, the cost can be acceptable, but without knowledge of the documentation, the user actually falls into a “trap”. The community recalls cases when engineers even had to cover thousands of dollars from their salaries for “erroneous queries”.
The situation with the “BigQuery scam” highlighted the vulnerability of the blockchain community to hidden costs in cloud services. For Google, this is a matter of transparency and trust, and for developers, a lesson in carefully studying documentation and pricing rules. If the problem is not resolved at the Google Cloud policy level, the company risks losing the trust of a significant part of the Web3 ecosystem.
