I like your thinking, but one minor clarification. BigQuery's actually introduced Flat Rate [0] ( a year ago) and Committed Use Discounts [1] (Amazon RIs are si

I like your thinking, but one minor clarification. BigQuery's actually introduced Flat Rate [0] ( a year ago) and Committed Use Discounts [1] (Amazon RIs are similar) since that's kind of what some Enterprises want. These are optional and flexible. I personally still hold that pay-per-use pricing is the cloud native approach [2], the most cost-efficient, and the most customer-friendly. However, it's unfamiliar and hard to predict, so starting out on Flat Rate pricing as a first step makes sense. ( work at Google and was a part of the team that introduced BQ Flat Rate) [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#flat_rate_pricing https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#flat_rate_pricing [1] https://hackernoon.com/why-googles-answer-to-aws-reseved-instances-is-a-big-deal-4b9b36d8e631 https://hackernoon.com/why-googles-answer-to-aws-reseved-ins... [2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/visualizing-the-mechanics-of-on-demand-pricing-in-big-data-technologies https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/visualizing-t...