Blockchain builders are sharing “horror tales” associated to eye-watering payments acquired from Google Cloud’s BigQuery service, together with a developer who was all of a sudden charged a complete of $15,000 for performing three queries.
BigQuery is a serverless knowledge warehouse supplied by Google Cloud, designed for analyzing giant units of information by way of Structured Question Language (SQL) with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
“I wish to warn everybody that BigQuery is a giant rip-off and each day you’re risking getting a ridiculous invoice that may bankrupt you,” wrote a pseudonymous developer in a post shared by Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of decentralized algorithmic buying and selling protocol Buying and selling Technique, including:
“Every month, my invoice is normally a number of hundred. This month I acquired a invoice for $18k.”
“Seems I did 3 bigquery searches on Solana with limits within the question, and every one price over $5k,” wrote the developer, including that after complaining to Google help, the fees had been decreased to $4k per question.
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A number of different crypto business members joined in, alleging predatory pricing mechanisms that do not enable the setting of month-to-month limits.
“They deliberately do not allow you to set exhausting stops,” responded Ermin Nurovic, co-founder of Flat Cash artificial greenback protocol, including, “Your Google Cloud operate acquired caught in a recursive loop costing you 1000’s? Too dangerous.”
Solana built-in with Google Cloud’s BigQuery in October 2023, permitting customers to question Solana blockchain knowledge, resembling whale transactions or NFT gross sales, by Google Cloud’s program, offering builders extra clear entry to archived blockchain knowledge by way of BigQuery analytics.
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Second developer “horror story” emerges with one other $5K cost
Including to the issues across the service’s billing mechanisms, a second pseudonymous developer emerged, who was charged $5,000 for “one question choose from a Solana desk,” which “unintentionally” scanned a number of terrabytes of information.
“Fortunately that point, our firm was linked to Google regionally, which helped us escalate the difficulty and refunded us,” wrote the developer within the post shared by Ohtamaa.
For the reason that billing incident, the developer has by no means queried “any blockchain knowledge in BigQuery with out checking the partitions first.”
The developer added that this pricing mannequin makes it unimaginable for AI algorithms to depend on BigQuery providers.
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