On-demand analytics priced per TB scanned — see what your queries cost.
BigQuery on-demand bills the data a query reads, so partitioning and column pruning are pure savings. For the warehouse-credit model instead, see the Snowflake credit cost calculator.
This BigQuery Query Cost Calculator estimates your monthly on-demand query bill — the amount Google charges for scanning data when you run SQL queries. It works by taking the total TB scanned per month, subtracting the free tier (the first TB Google does not bill), and multiplying the remaining billable volume by your price per TB scanned. The queries per month input helps you translate raw activity into total data scanned, so the main cost drivers are simple: how much data each query reads, how often you run queries, and the per-TB rate in your region.
The key thing to watch is that on-demand billing charges for bytes scanned, not rows returned — a SELECT * over a wide, unpartitioned table can scan far more data than you expect. Use this calculator to test how selecting fewer columns, partitioning tables, or filtering on clustered fields lowers TB scanned and therefore cost. Watch the free-tier boundary too: once monthly usage exceeds your free TB, every additional query is billed, so small increases in scan volume translate directly into a higher bill.
By bytes scanned, at about $6.25 per TB (first 1TB free each month). It charges for the data your query reads, not the rows it returns — so a query touching a whole table costs the same whether you return one row or a million.
Partition tables by date and cluster by common filters so queries prune to a fraction of the data, select only the columns you need (never SELECT *), materialize expensive aggregations, and preview with LIMIT-free dry runs. Reducing bytes scanned is the entire game.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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