Databases · pricing
BigQuery pricing
BigQuery publishes 2 tiers. Below is each one, what it adds over the tier beneath it, and where the ladder stops being worth climbing for most people.
As of 30 August 2026, BigQuery pricing is free across 2 published tiers. Figures are the vendor's list prices as recorded on this page's last check; the vendor's site is the final word.
- Entry price
- Free
- Model
- Usage-based
- Tiers
- 2
- Free tier
- Yes
BigQuery plans, side by side
Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.
| Plan | Price | Features listed | Step up from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Free | 3 | Entry tier |
| On-demand | $6.25/TB | 3 | +$6.25/TB, 3 more features |
What each tier adds
The set difference between each tier's feature list and the one beneath it. Where a tier lists nothing new, the vendor has either stopped repeating the inherited list or the tier raises limits rather than adding capability, the record does not distinguish the two, so this page does not either.
Free Tier
FreeThe entry tier. It covers 1tb queries/month, 10gb storage/month, standard support.
On-demand
$6.25/TBOver Free Tier, this tier adds:
- Pay per query
- Pay per storage
- All features
Where BigQuery stops being free
Free Tier, Free
- 1TB queries/month
- 10GB storage/month
- Standard support
On-demand, $6.25/TB
The first thing you pay for:
- Pay per query
- Pay per storage
- All features
What the product covers
The full BigQuery feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.
Other
- Serverless compute
- Separation of storage and compute
- Two pricing models
- Partitioning and clustering
- Materialised views
- BigQuery ML
- Storage Write API
- BI Engine
- BigQuery Omni
- IAM integration
People bring BigQuery in for a warehouse for an organisation already on google cloud, where identity, logging and billing are consolidated in the same place, bursty analytical workloads with long idle periods, where paying per query beats keeping a cluster running, event and clickstream analytics ingested continuously through the storage write api and queried without a load window, analytics teams with no infrastructure staff, where the absence of anything to tune or patch is worth more than dialect portability. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to BigQuery are worth a look before you commit to a tier.
How that compares in Databases
Too few databases tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Rated | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BigQuery (this page) | Free | usage-based | - | |
| Canary Labs | $3000/year | Per tag band per year | - | vs BigQuery |
| Presto | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs BigQuery |
| Privacera | On request | quote | - | vs BigQuery |
| Dremio | Free, then $0.2/hour | Per Dremio Compute Unit consumed | - | vs BigQuery |
| Solace PubSub+ | Free | quote | - | vs BigQuery |
| StarRocks | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs BigQuery |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the BigQuery badges page.
Before you pay for BigQuery
Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.
What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: 2 tiers between Free and $6.25/TB, with the jump itemised above. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.
BigQuery runs on web, cloud api, and is published by Google Cloud of Mountain View, California. The full record is on the BigQuery review, and the rest of the category is under best databases tools.
BigQuery pricing questions
- How much does BigQuery cost?
- BigQuery publishes 2 tiers, from Free for Free Tier up to $6.25/TB for On-demand. The entry tier costs nothing.
- Does BigQuery have a free plan?
- Yes. The Free Tier tier costs nothing and covers 1tb queries/month, 10gb storage/month, standard support. Paying starts at $6.25/TB for On-demand.
- What is the difference between Free Tier and On-demand on BigQuery?
- On-demand costs $6.25/TB against Free, and adds pay per query, pay per storage, all features.
- Which databases tools can I use without paying?
- 5 of the 8 databases tools listed alongside BigQuery have a free tier: Presto, Dremio, Solace PubSub+, StarRocks, EMQX.
- What am I actually paying for with BigQuery?
- The record lists 10 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for a warehouse for an organisation already on google cloud, where identity, logging and billing are consolidated in the same place, bursty analytical workloads with long idle periods, where paying per query beats keeping a cluster running, event and clickstream analytics ingested continuously through the storage write api and queried without a load window.
- Does BigQuery charge per user?
- The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 2 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
- Are these BigQuery prices current?
- They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
- What should I compare BigQuery against before paying?
- The closest databases tools in this directory are Canary Labs, Presto, Privacera, Dremio. Each has a side-by-side comparison with BigQuery covering price, platforms and features.