Solana devs hit with $5K bills for single Google BigQuery queries
Solana developers are raising alarms over unexpected charges from Google Cloud’s BigQuery, with some reporting bills of up to $5,000 per query. One developer claimed three Solana queries cost $15,000 before Google support reduced the charges to $4,000 each.
BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse service, allows blockchain analytics at scale, but developers argue its pricing model is “predatory,” pointing to the lack of hard stop limits and accidental scans of terabytes of data. Another dev said a single Solana table query triggered a $5,000 bill, later refunded.
The controversy comes less than a year after Solana integrated with BigQuery in October 2023, enabling on-chain data queries like whale tracking and NFT sales. Critics warn that such pricing makes it risky for blockchain teams and nearly impossible for AI algorithms to rely on the service for real-time data analytics.
