Blockchain devs complain about Google's "BigQuery scam" after paying $5K for a query

While blockchain developers face risks from hackers and exploiters targeting their platforms, being unaware of data query costs might surprise them with a bill worth thousands of USD for a single query.

Developers are now sharing stories of how they were charged more than $5,000 for a single query from Google Cloud's BigQuery, a "data warehouse for analytics."

After Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of Trading Strategy, an algorithmic trading protocol for decentralized markets, shared an anonymous complaint from their developer group, more developers came forward with similar experiences.

In our dev group, someone is really pissed off about Google Cloud billing and BigQuery pic.twitter.com/eMTDxNXrd1

undefined Mikko Ohtamaa (@moo9000) August 26, 2025

The shared story claims that its author has been using BigQuery for six years, while their monthly bills were "usually a few hundred."

"This month I got a bill for $18k," the developer said, adding that on August 14th, their website went down "because Google auto billing blocked all my services," which was reinstated a day later after talking to Google support.

"Turns out I did three BigQuery searches on Solana with limits in the query, and each one cost over $5k. After complaining, they finally decided to reduce charges to $4k for one time," the post said, adding that they're leaving Google Cloud for good and urging others to beware of the "BigQuery scam."

The Solana (SOL) blockchain dataset has been available on BigQuery since October 2023, helping developers gather data on transactions, wallets, and more.

However, other shared stories reportedly ended with a refund from Google. A separate anonymous post shared by Ohtamaa claims that a developer was also charged $5,000 for one Solana-related query.

"Thankfully, that time, our company was connected to Google locally, which helped us escalate the issue and get a refund," the developer said, adding that since then, they never query any blockchain data in BigQuery without checking the partitions first. Partitions split a large dataset into smaller ones.

According to the developer, if you don't read the docs on how this service operates, you're in "a trap."

"If you don't make use of partitions (which it doesn't do by default), it processes the entire table. Eventually, we did end up using BigQuery regardless (it's cheap enough if partitioned), but since then I've strictly stayed away from Google Cloud, even with their free credits scheme," another developer, @qedk_, said.

Meanwhile, while others said they learned this lesson the hard way by paying "significantly more" than $5,000, another story resurfaced from 2024, when an engineer, @tonykebot, said that his boss deducted $3,000 from his salary for "running a stupid query on Google Cloud BigQuery."

We’ve contacted Google for comment and will update this story should a comment be forthcoming.