18 ms·

Warning: $14k BigQuery charge in 2 hours

198 points by nothttparchive 3y ago

mikeortman 3y ago
The dataset IS free to download, but running a query against it on Google Cloudis what costs $$$. BigQuery is basically renting servers to scan through the data, which is the fee
- threeseed 3y ago
  Given how small the dataset is there is no query that justifies a $14k charge. AWS charges $27/hour for a server with 3TB of memory. Enough to run the queries in memory.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    It's easy to make an enormous query by joining to other data (or to the same data), or reading a lot of data. A regex query on response_bodies would churn through 2.5TB of data every time it's run.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    BQ charges you based on the volume of data being scanned. I think this is a situation which involves scanning the whole dataset again and again without fully understanding how it works. I’ve worked with much larger datasets on BQ (petabyte scale) and managed to not spend more than $1000 in an hour. Also, BQ tells you how much data will be processed BEFORE you run the query, which makes it easier to understand the cost implications. Again, you could fit the whole dataset in memory in an EC2 instance and do your thing.
- treffer 3y ago
  The complaint says there should be a warning that processing fees can be high. Go to the front page and check out the links. Nothing really about cost. Someone follows that path and 14k gone without a word about it. That's the path that people are sent down from the website. It explicitly talks about using BQ for analysis. A simple "running queries over the whole dataset can cause significant costs due to the size of the dataset" should be enough. And I think that's a valid and fair point. The whole part of accusing Google should just be ignored.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    The setup instructions mention what you’re asking. https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc...
    - treffer 3y ago
      I can't even find "cost" on that page. Only one rather tiny side note that you could get past the free tier quota. I don't think that's a proper warning on costs.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    > The whole part of accusing Google should just be ignored. I don't know. Google could trivially solve this problem by imposing an opt-out warning on potentially expensive queries. "It looks like your query might cost $14k. Are you sure?" But money.
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      It probably wasn't a single query costing $14k, but more like 1k costing $14.
nothttparchive 3y ago
This website makes it seem like this “public” dataset is for the community to use, but it is instead a for-profit money maker for Google Cloud and you can lose tens of thousands of dollars. Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, and they won’t remove the fee. This official website should be updated to warn people Google is apparently now hosting this dataset to make money. I don’t think that was the original mission, but that’s what it is today, there’s basically zero customer support, and you can lose $14k in the blink of an eye. Academics, especially grad students, need to be aware of this before they give a credit card number to Google. In fact, I’d caution against using this dataset whatsoever with this new business model attached.
- throwaway888abc 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - httparchive 3y ago
    I used this data when I was a grad student, back when there wasn't a fee for it, so I'm mostly concerned students will get hit with charges that will make it so they can't buy groceries. The website has the Internet Archive logo on it, and it looks like a public resource for researchers, and it used to be free to use. The point of this is for the HTTP Archive to make it clear this is a paid product from Google Cloud, not a "public service".
    - MattGaiser 3y ago
      That is pretty clearly documented in the setup instructions. https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc... There are multiple notes about cost. In particular, this one stands out. > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore
epanchin 3y ago
To be brutally honest, it’s badly considered queries like yours that mean these services cannot be free.
- threeseed 3y ago
  This comment is hilariously insane. The idea that Google would give away BigQuery for free if only people would write better SQL queries.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    There are plenty of APIs on the internet that are free that query a database for information. If queries are too expensive it's not viable to run for free.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Or, GCP could implement cost/resource/use limits, which would allow them to give away whatever they wanted for free without any concern about people over using it, while also allowing people to avoid shooting their own feet off.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I don’t disagree but how does that work exactly? When you hit the quota the query gets cancelled? That’s definitely already a feature of Redshift Spectrum with WLM. Does BigQuery offer something similar?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      My first choice would be something like "this query will cost $13953, which exceeds your default cap of $100; please click the confirm button if you really want to run it". (The dollars could be CPU-minutes or whatever if you want to use resource based limits, which might play nicer with a free tier) Edit: rereading, I think this is actually for non-interactive scripts, in which case yes it should just cancel the query Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 was kind enough to point out that the resource-based version of this might actually exist, which is nice
MattGaiser 3y ago
> Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, This comment kind of suggests that you do not understand how BigQuery bills. The archive pays for the storage, but you have to pay for the queries. You would also have had to attach a billing account to run those queries. Running BigQuery searches is not free. Expensive lesson, but on the surface this one appears to be your error.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  It seems excessive to allow USD 14k spend on a newly created account, or and account with no prior big spend. If I was Google, I would not allow it without explicitly raising limits or increasing quotas. Otherwise there is a big chance there customer can not pay and they just lost that resource – unless you don't really have an expense for that resource and you use predatory pricing.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    It's like predatory telcos who charge you "roaming data fees: $4,500, but took bad you didn't check your online bill before" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/04/users-62000-data-bill-a-result-of-poor-travel-planning/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/04/users-62000-data-bil...
- httparchive 3y ago
  Yes and no, I ran the script before and the fee wasn't that high (they jacked it up last summer). Usually I have to jump through a ton of hoops just to add more CPU cores to my VMs so I "trusted" that GCP would warn me if I ever made an error. One of the bigger issues is they charged my card before I literally had any notice what the bill was - it wasn't even in the dashboard yet. I would have terminated the script ASAP had I gotten *any* warning.
mulmen 3y ago
What was the query you ran?
- httparchive 3y ago
  I was doing historical evaluation for a few sites, so I was running a query for each month going back to 2016 for each site. I've done this before with no real issues, and if I knew the charges were rapidly exploding I'd have halted the script immediately - but instead it ran for 2 hours and the first notice I got was the CC charge.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    My guess is you were querying all the data each time. If you instead filter out the rows you are interested in (e.g. the particular "few sites" by their URL) and put that in a new table, querying the resulting, tiny table will be very cheap.
  - eklitzke 3y ago
    I haven't looked at the exact schema for this dataset but for this type of query pattern to be efficient the data would need to be partitioned by date.^[1] I'm guessing that it's not partitioned this way and therefore each of these queries that was looking at "one month" of data was doing a full table scan, so if you queried N months you did N table scans even though the exact same query results could have been achieved even without partitioning by doing one table scan with some kind of aggregation (e.g. GROUP BY) clause. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Can you be more specific? What filtering did you apply? How many columns did you select?
    - httparchive 3y ago
      SELECT page, url, payload FROM `{table}` WHERE page like '%{site_domain}/%' AND url like '%[EXAMPLE.COM]%'
summerlight 3y ago
I frequently see this kind of surprising billing anecdotes across many cloud providers. Why don't they provide a way to set a hard budget limit applied for the entire account. I tried to see what can be done for GCP and this seems pretty daunting. https://medium.com/@steffenjanbrouwer/how-to-set-a-hard-payment-spending-cost-limits-for-google-cloud-platform-projects-d4fee7550d42 https://medium.com/@steffenjanbrouwer/how-to-set-a-hard-paym...
- Bjartr 3y ago
  Because they aren't sufficiently incentivized to make giving them your money harder.
- klysm 3y ago
  What incentive to cloud providers have to give you that ability? I think they greatly appreciate the ability to accidentally spend a lot of money
  - summerlight 3y ago
    To prevent a bad PR like this? When it goes viral, most customer supports escalate it to a higher level then they just eventually cancel the bill.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      Google does not care about bad PR like this. It doesn't affect their biggest customers.
    - JCharante 3y ago
      What bad PR? This is just a kid who can't read and thinks they can process 2PB of data for absolutely free. No GCP customer will care.
  - braza 3y ago
fabian2k 3y ago
The cloud isn't something I'd ever use my private credit card on, there are just too many ways to screw it up if you're not very careful and know what you're doing. I don't think I would have hit this particular issue, but that is mainly because I've read a bunch of stories of this kind and BigQuery is one of the things I associate with "can get very expensive very quickly" based on those. I know the explanations and justifications for it, but for personal use a service where I can't put a hard limit on usage is simply not acceptable for me. It's just not worth the risk.
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  There is a really easy fix to this problem: setting billing limits. This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. These incidents just show a lack of professionalism on the part of the person incurring the costs. I personally did on the first day I setup a cloud computing account when I was still doing my BS in college. It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.
  - blibble 3y ago
    > This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. well, other than the three market leaders (GCP, AWS and Azure)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - bugbuddy 3y ago
      True these giants make their own lives easier and don’t implement much billing controls into the infrastructure. It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. Use billing alerts, hacks, and research things carefully before jumping with both feet.
      - joepie91_ 3y ago
        > It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. This is victim blaming.
braza 3y ago
To be honest, even the official guide [1] for BG does not have any information about how to make some info about query cost, budget, and service limits mechanisms [2]. I think the HTTP Archive team could set something in that regard. PS: When I was an instructor for some cloud training in AWS, the first 2 hours were only to set up billing and budgets to avoid any kind of situation like this. No one would start training without all those locks in place in the first place. [1] - https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs
- httparchive 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm basically just having to write this off so it sucks for me (a lot - I'm bootstrapping a start up), but I'm more worried about other people (especially students) getting caught up in what feels like a scam given the language on the website not, ya know, mentioning the risk of being charged $14k.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I understand the argument against hard circuit-breakers (yeah, seems like a good idea, but had a good traffic spike and I'm down). But it makes even me cautious with respect to scenarios where I could just fat finger something. There are some controls but there are no guarantees in most cases.
  - hobofan 3y ago
    The getting started guide linked by the website states: > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore Could this be a bigger warning? Sure. Is something a scam just because they don't explain the general implications of entering your payment information to a usage-billed product? Not really.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
darth_avocado 3y ago
I am sorry but this seems to be more of a “TLDR; didn’t read;” situation. The http archive clearly mentions that the data is available for offline processing or for querying online on BQ. And in the “Getting started” section of the instructions, it is mentioned multiple times on how BQ will charge you. And even if it wasn’t mentioned anywhere, it’s a little presumptuous to assume a tool for processing data will not charge you money for literally processing TBs of data again and again. > Note: BigQuery has a free tier that you can use to get started without enabling billing. At the time of this writing, the free tier allows 10GB of storage and 1TB of data processing per month. Google also provides a $300 credit for new accounts. > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore > When we look at the results of this, you can see how much data was processed during this query. Writing efficient queries limits the number of bytes processed - which is helpful since that's how BigQuery is billed. Note: There is 1TB free per month https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- httparchive 3y ago
  Yes, sure there's stuff I could have done better, and stayed up all night looking at the fine print. But that's not the point - this is *warning* to other people who see the Internet Archive logo, the words "public", and for some dumb reason also trust Google. I'm hoping this doesn't happen to others, I learned a costly lesson.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dabernathy89 3y ago
  I'm on OP's side - even if I knew I'd be paying to run some queries against this dataset, I never would have thought it could reach 5 figures in such a short time. And you can't argue that the billing is straightforward. The "Getting Started" guide for the HTTP Archive doesn't even describe what indexes are available/commonly used for limiting the scanned rows.
jeffparsons 3y ago
Warning: most cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) require you to accept unlimited liability to use their services. If you're running a business and you have lawyers, then fair enough — just play the game. But for individuals, it seems crazy that so many of us accept this sort of thing. Good luck contesting the charge with your credit card company when you already agreed to a contract that said Google could bill you thousands of dollars and then you used thousands of dollars worth of their service. Big cloud providers are not your friend. They do not care if they destroy the lives of you and your family, unless it's happening so often that it's making mainstream news. My advice is to go and delete your cloud accounts, and only use services that offer hard spending caps, and ideally prepaid accounts. Maybe this doesn't leave many options. Oh well. Maybe if you can't afford big lawyers then you also can't afford the risks of using big cloud.
- nothttparchive 3y ago
  Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.
  - jeffparsons 3y ago
    IANAL, but if this happened to me I would be gathering as many examples as I could of this having happened to other people. The angle being: Google knows this is a huge issue. Effectively, they know that they have (presumably accidentally) created a really dangerous trap for small players, and have chosen to do nothing about it. In some jurisdictions I think that reduces the legitimacy of their claim that you actually owe them money. EDIT: Even better, focus on the examples where Google "forgave" the debt; you could argue that those examples prove that Google knows it's at least partly their fault.
    - Affric 3y ago
      I would love to see an example of this working. I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically
neilv 3y ago
Not the same thing, but: some pre-Web Usenet programs would have warnings before "expensive" operations: > Version 4.3 patch 30 of rn’s Pnews.SH (September 5, 1986, published to support the new top-level groups) introduced the “thousands of machines” message: > > This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. -- https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14763/what-warning-was-given-on-attempting-to-post-to-usenet-circa-1990/14764#14764 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14763/wha...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bearjaws 3y ago
Had this happen (but more like $100) analyzing the GitHub dataset on GCP. Honestly I was already concerned when it was taking more than 5 minutes to return a result. Once I saw how slow it was I found my error, not querying the sample dataset that was a fraction of the size, to make sure my filtering worked.
KomoD 3y ago
How big of a query do you have to make to get charged $14k...? Isn't it billed by data transfer
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  No, by amount of data scanned to answer the query. This would be about 2.2PB worth of data. Partitioning matters y'all!
  - KomoD 3y ago
    Ah, ok.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  On-demand pricing in the US charges $6.25 per TiB (and the first TiB per month is free). So $14k would be about 2,240 TiB. I wonder what sort of partitioning and clustering is used for the tables.
gelatocar 3y ago
Have you tried getting in touch with GCP to see if they would refund the charge? I've heard plenty of stories of cloud services refunding large one-off accidental spends like this one.
- zmarty 3y ago
  "Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, *and they won’t remove the fee.*"
mekoka 3y ago
This is a matter of a user not having read some fine prints, which doesn't mean that they're necessarily at fault. The only way to know which of the user, httparchive.org, or Google BQ is most responsible is to know how often similar situations arise in this specific context (i.e. using BQ by way of httparchive.org).
londons_explore 3y ago
Just ask support. In almost all cases, they'll cancel the charges.
- justinclift 3y ago
  It's already been pointed out that they've been asked, but are refusing to cancel the charges.
Jgrubb 3y ago
BQ lesson #1 - don't select * on a gigundous dataset. Lesson #2 - if you select * on a gigundous dataset, make sure it's on your employers bill.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Also, only do this on your employers bill if you no longer want to be employed. If your employer is a small business and you nuke them from orbit by doing this a few times, it's unlikely to go well.
kshmir 3y ago
Just set quotas by default…
tills13 3y ago
Sorry but I can't get over the hyperbole in > This website makes it seem like this “public” dataset is for the community to use, but it is instead a for-profit money maker for Google Cloud and you can lose tens of thousands of dollars. you didn't understand what you were doing. HA's datasets are public and free. It is not a "for-profit money maker for Google Cloud". Sorry, sucks for you but blaming the restaurant when you bit off more of the steak than you can chew is not how this works.
francoismassot 3y ago
BigQuery is just too costly... Do you know if the dataset is public? We should just offer a cheap alternative and ditch BigQuery.
nomilk 3y ago
Could you explain the steps you went through that led to you using BigQuery? The reason I ask is most of us probably use GCP and only ever interact with BigQuery via GCP. But it seems your entry point was a bit different to most (e.g. seems you might have clicked on a link to GCP from HTTP Archive, or perhaps something else?). FWIW I use BigQuery a lot and as a rough guide I assume about 1c per GB scanned. So if I query a dataset that's 1TB, that's about $10. If the same data were stored on a relational db, the same query would take about a day (or at least a good part of a day). Because BigQuery returns a result so quickly (e.g. <1 minute) it can be easy to miss the insane amount of work it did to get there. So I could see someone accidentally putting that ~1min (but 1TB!) query into a loop or something, and boom, there's your $15k bill. Accidents happen. Also FWIW, I've found although the big 3 cloud's pricing is tricky (since there are so many services), I find them much better than the PaaS built on top of the big 3 clouds. My suspicion is that the PaaS's have a strong incentive to obscure their pricing because customers can typically see what their costs are (e.g. if they buy some compute from AWS at $0.16/hr and sell it for $1.40/hr, that can be seen as a bit of a rip, hence they try to obscure it). But I think the big 3 are not too bad at this practice. It really bugs me when anyone deliberately obscures their prices, and it's often an indicator of more shady practices to come.
Megustatrw 3y ago
I'm saying this for a decade now. There is no hard billing cut, people normally tell me that no one wants that because customers and service disruption but I want that I want a hard budget cutoff A VM with max settings doing crypto mining can be very expensive and adding more of them is easy. And you know what else is super hidden costly? Log digestion for metrics. Egress. Auto scaling . You can create costs for someone by just downloading their assets _a lot_
HermitX 3y ago
My view on such matters is that it's best to find a solution that has a fallback option, which usually is an open-source software. That is to say, if you choose a cloud service, it's preferable that it is built on some open-source software. This way, if the costs become uncontrollable in the end, you can still fall back to an open-source software. For instance, CelerData has built its cloud service on StarRocks, and it's said that many users have used it to replace Snowflake and Big Query. Of course, you could also opt for Elasticsearch's cloud service, and if problems arise, you can replace it with OpenSearch.
matrix2596 3y ago
I would like these APIs to have prepaid options. Then you can control your max budget. Even OPENAI doesnt have that option.
Havoc 3y ago
Here is a gigantic footgun powerful enough to nuke yourself back into the Stone Age. To learn how to use it you’ll have to try it. Learning by doing. Trial and error. And no you may not use blanks while learning use of footgun. No training wheels. No precautions. Has to be live - full send unlimited risk. Actually - here are some safety squints (billing alerts) - just to give you some illusion of control. Good luck! Yours truly big cloud
- justinclift 3y ago
  Fits in well with everyone's natural first query (SELECT * FROM everything), so people can see the type of data it's returning in order to narrow it down.
  - everforward 3y ago
    Not specifically because of BigQuery, but I have taken to adding " LIMIT 10" to that for my default query because of accidentally locking up 10TB databases too many times.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Good thinking. :)
nathants 3y ago
there is very little reason to use services like big query. they are all insanely over priced. always use plain ec2 spot and s3. lots of smaller instances. fewer larger instances. single massive instance. whatever. fancy sql thingy, awk and grep, or whatever else. do your data processing with ephemeral spot priced compute and persist as little data as possible to s3. $2-5/hour gets an insane amount of ec2 spot. egress aside, no surprise bill is possible. empathy for op though. not a fun day. just a bump in the road though, keep on trucking!
- adrianmsmith 3y ago
  BigQuery is an amazing product and there are good reasons to use it. One place I worked at had a table with 100 billion rows. And some other tables as well. If a manager asked for an ad-hoc query, it was 5 minutes of writing a SQL query including JOINs (which didn't need to worry about which fields were indexed etc. e.g. you could write WHERE then a regex), and $15 and 5 minutes later I'd have the answer. Apparently 100s of VMs were started and stopped to answer that query, but it all happened automatically, at very low cost.
httparchive 3y ago
Update: Google has been helping me out now, thankfully. Hopefully we can make sure this doesn't happen to others.
- dang 3y ago
  Can you please pick a different username that we can rename your account to? Some users are complaining that your current username is misleading (e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447421) Edit: since I didn't hear back from you, I've consed a 'not' onto the username 'httparchive'. If you prefer a different name, feel free to contact us at hn@ycombinator.com.
renonce 3y ago
So now you say on your webpage your pricing is $1/TB or something. Great. But there is a caveat: the amount you pay depends on some complex factors such as the size of the table or the duration of your code. If the factors are so simple that no more than grade-level arithmetic is required to calculate my costs then that would be fine. But what if it gets a little bit more complex than that, such as “table size is 1PB and cost per 1TB is $1”? Did you know 1PB=1000TB rather than 0.001TB? What about “you need another $10 query to figure out the size of the table”? Or “the cost depends on number of function calls that your code makes and if you accidentally recursed yourself too many times you can’t limit it”? Or “The server is $5/mon but IP is $1/h and outbound traffic is $10/GB and if someone download something 1TB on your server you will pay $10000 within 2 hours”? At some point the factors related to billing is going to become non-trivial and every sentence in a long 10 page document could have 100x’d your costs, what makes this service different from a scam? You could have allowed me to set a billing cap so I won’t have to pay anything beyond $10, so that “$10” is everything I have to care about, could you?
- handoflixue 3y ago
  > At some point the factors related to billing is going to become non-trivial First response on the OG link covers this with a screenshot: the size of the query is previewed beforehand, and you have to check a checkbox to acknowledge it. (I dare say listing it in PB instead of $$$ is still a scummy move, etc. - but they do resolve about half of your concerns right there)
scotty79 3y ago
If estimated cost for is so easy to calculate why not put it in the UI? "Running this query will touch 2PB of data so you'll be charged $20000" for it..
- bunbun69 3y ago
  1) not easy to calculate 2) the query needs to be run to see the true cost
  - scotty79 3y ago
    The person responding to complaint was quick to point out that size of data displayed in the UI relates directly to estimated cost. I see no reason this estimated cost shouldn't be shown in the UI as well.
olliej 3y ago
It's interesting that in the post there's a maintainer pointing out that there's a very tiny little checkbox that says "this will process X PB of data". Given that your account knows how much your queries cost per TB it does seem like an "dark UI" design to not just say how much the query will actually cost. Similarly that checkbox being a tiny part of the UI, and not allowing people to set up cost limits on a query (or not having them at the account level), does seem very much like an "encourage people to overspend" UX. I'm sure "overspend to the level of a $14k bill to an individual" is not intended, but that's a reasonably predictable occasional outcome for this design. So on the one hand, yes they did click a checkbox saying they were aware of the amount of data being processed, but OTOH the UI seems to be specifically designed to encourage this kind of mistake.
justinclift 3y ago
Wow. No guard rails whatsoever on queries like this? Their UI clearly has all the info needed in order to put guard rails in place (aka big scary warning dialog in red), as it's already giving a non-obvious warning about the expected data usage. Blaming users for this seems like a bastard act. Talk about causing further reputational damage... :( :( :(
nojvek 3y ago
Does it work if you use a prepaid credit card with the cloud providers that only have a set amount of money?
falling_myshkin 3y ago
i don't disagree with the premise that Google should be responsible and explicitly acknowledge that the average computer-interested person trying out bigquery has no clue how sharp of a knife it is and they actually do need to be protected from themselves. I was in this boat only a few months ago. One thing I will say though is that I think the documentation is actually quite comprehensive, and personally after taking the time to RTFM and actually understand things like columnar storage, partitioned and clustered tables, etc., I was able to optimize costs quite a bit for our use case and am quite pleased with the product overall. Just takes time to learn, it's a (necessarily imo) intricate machine.
mrkramer 3y ago
I thought you could cap(limit) your spending e.g. "if I reach $1000 in costs, abort/pause operations".

The dataset IS free to download, but running a query against it on Google Cloudis what costs $$$. BigQuery is basically renting servers to scan through the data, which is the fee

threeseed 3y ago
Given how small the dataset is there is no query that justifies a $14k charge. AWS charges $27/hour for a server with 3TB of memory. Enough to run the queries in memory.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  It's easy to make an enormous query by joining to other data (or to the same data), or reading a lot of data. A regex query on response_bodies would churn through 2.5TB of data every time it's run.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  BQ charges you based on the volume of data being scanned. I think this is a situation which involves scanning the whole dataset again and again without fully understanding how it works. I’ve worked with much larger datasets on BQ (petabyte scale) and managed to not spend more than $1000 in an hour. Also, BQ tells you how much data will be processed BEFORE you run the query, which makes it easier to understand the cost implications. Again, you could fit the whole dataset in memory in an EC2 instance and do your thing.
treffer 3y ago
The complaint says there should be a warning that processing fees can be high. Go to the front page and check out the links. Nothing really about cost. Someone follows that path and 14k gone without a word about it. That's the path that people are sent down from the website. It explicitly talks about using BQ for analysis. A simple "running queries over the whole dataset can cause significant costs due to the size of the dataset" should be enough. And I think that's a valid and fair point. The whole part of accusing Google should just be ignored.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  The setup instructions mention what you’re asking. https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc...
  - treffer 3y ago
    I can't even find "cost" on that page. Only one rather tiny side note that you could get past the free tier quota. I don't think that's a proper warning on costs.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- IshKebab 3y ago
  > The whole part of accusing Google should just be ignored. I don't know. Google could trivially solve this problem by imposing an opt-out warning on potentially expensive queries. "It looks like your query might cost $14k. Are you sure?" But money.
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    It probably wasn't a single query costing $14k, but more like 1k costing $14.

nothttparchive 3y ago

This website makes it seem like this “public” dataset is for the community to use, but it is instead a for-profit money maker for Google Cloud and you can lose tens of thousands of dollars. Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, and they won’t remove the fee. This official website should be updated to warn people Google is apparently now hosting this dataset to make money. I don’t think that was the original mission, but that’s what it is today, there’s basically zero customer support, and you can lose $14k in the blink of an eye. Academics, especially grad students, need to be aware of this before they give a credit card number to Google. In fact, I’d caution against using this dataset whatsoever with this new business model attached.

throwaway888abc 3y ago
[flagged]
- httparchive 3y ago
  I used this data when I was a grad student, back when there wasn't a fee for it, so I'm mostly concerned students will get hit with charges that will make it so they can't buy groceries. The website has the Internet Archive logo on it, and it looks like a public resource for researchers, and it used to be free to use. The point of this is for the HTTP Archive to make it clear this is a paid product from Google Cloud, not a "public service".
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    That is pretty clearly documented in the setup instructions. https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc... There are multiple notes about cost. In particular, this one stands out. > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore

epanchin 3y ago

To be brutally honest, it’s badly considered queries like yours that mean these services cannot be free.

threeseed 3y ago
This comment is hilariously insane. The idea that Google would give away BigQuery for free if only people would write better SQL queries.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  There are plenty of APIs on the internet that are free that query a database for information. If queries are too expensive it's not viable to run for free.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Or, GCP could implement cost/resource/use limits, which would allow them to give away whatever they wanted for free without any concern about people over using it, while also allowing people to avoid shooting their own feet off.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I don’t disagree but how does that work exactly? When you hit the quota the query gets cancelled? That’s definitely already a feature of Redshift Spectrum with WLM. Does BigQuery offer something similar?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    My first choice would be something like "this query will cost $13953, which exceeds your default cap of $100; please click the confirm button if you really want to run it". (The dollars could be CPU-minutes or whatever if you want to use resource based limits, which might play nicer with a free tier) Edit: rereading, I think this is actually for non-interactive scripts, in which case yes it should just cancel the query Edit 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 was kind enough to point out that the resource-based version of this might actually exist, which is nice

MattGaiser 3y ago

> Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, This comment kind of suggests that you do not understand how BigQuery bills. The archive pays for the storage, but you have to pay for the queries. You would also have had to attach a billing account to run those queries. Running BigQuery searches is not free. Expensive lesson, but on the surface this one appears to be your error.

madsbuch 3y ago
It seems excessive to allow USD 14k spend on a newly created account, or and account with no prior big spend. If I was Google, I would not allow it without explicitly raising limits or increasing quotas. Otherwise there is a big chance there customer can not pay and they just lost that resource – unless you don't really have an expense for that resource and you use predatory pricing.
- rvnx 3y ago
  It's like predatory telcos who charge you "roaming data fees: $4,500, but took bad you didn't check your online bill before" https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/04/users-62000-data-bill-a-result-of-poor-travel-planning/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/04/users-62000-data-bil...
httparchive 3y ago
Yes and no, I ran the script before and the fee wasn't that high (they jacked it up last summer). Usually I have to jump through a ton of hoops just to add more CPU cores to my VMs so I "trusted" that GCP would warn me if I ever made an error. One of the bigger issues is they charged my card before I literally had any notice what the bill was - it wasn't even in the dashboard yet. I would have terminated the script ASAP had I gotten *any* warning.

mulmen 3y ago

What was the query you ran?

httparchive 3y ago
I was doing historical evaluation for a few sites, so I was running a query for each month going back to 2016 for each site. I've done this before with no real issues, and if I knew the charges were rapidly exploding I'd have halted the script immediately - but instead it ran for 2 hours and the first notice I got was the CC charge.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  My guess is you were querying all the data each time. If you instead filter out the rows you are interested in (e.g. the particular "few sites" by their URL) and put that in a new table, querying the resulting, tiny table will be very cheap.
- eklitzke 3y ago
  I haven't looked at the exact schema for this dataset but for this type of query pattern to be efficient the data would need to be partitioned by date.^[1] I'm guessing that it's not partitioned this way and therefore each of these queries that was looking at "one month" of data was doing a full table scan, so if you queried N months you did N table scans even though the exact same query results could have been achieved even without partitioning by doing one table scan with some kind of aggregation (e.g. GROUP BY) clause. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables
- mulmen 3y ago
  Can you be more specific? What filtering did you apply? How many columns did you select?
  - httparchive 3y ago
    SELECT page, url, payload FROM `{table}` WHERE page like '%{site_domain}/%' AND url like '%[EXAMPLE.COM]%'

summerlight 3y ago

I frequently see this kind of surprising billing anecdotes across many cloud providers. Why don't they provide a way to set a hard budget limit applied for the entire account. I tried to see what can be done for GCP and this seems pretty daunting. https://medium.com/@steffenjanbrouwer/how-to-set-a-hard-payment-spending-cost-limits-for-google-cloud-platform-projects-d4fee7550d42 https://medium.com/@steffenjanbrouwer/how-to-set-a-hard-paym...

Bjartr 3y ago
Because they aren't sufficiently incentivized to make giving them your money harder.
klysm 3y ago
What incentive to cloud providers have to give you that ability? I think they greatly appreciate the ability to accidentally spend a lot of money
- summerlight 3y ago
  To prevent a bad PR like this? When it goes viral, most customer supports escalate it to a higher level then they just eventually cancel the bill.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Google does not care about bad PR like this. It doesn't affect their biggest customers.
  - JCharante 3y ago
    What bad PR? This is just a kid who can't read and thinks they can process 2PB of data for absolutely free. No GCP customer will care.
- braza 3y ago

fabian2k 3y ago

The cloud isn't something I'd ever use my private credit card on, there are just too many ways to screw it up if you're not very careful and know what you're doing. I don't think I would have hit this particular issue, but that is mainly because I've read a bunch of stories of this kind and BigQuery is one of the things I associate with "can get very expensive very quickly" based on those. I know the explanations and justifications for it, but for personal use a service where I can't put a hard limit on usage is simply not acceptable for me. It's just not worth the risk.

bugbuddy 3y ago
There is a really easy fix to this problem: setting billing limits. This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. These incidents just show a lack of professionalism on the part of the person incurring the costs. I personally did on the first day I setup a cloud computing account when I was still doing my BS in college. It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.
- blibble 3y ago
  > This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. well, other than the three market leaders (GCP, AWS and Azure)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bugbuddy 3y ago
    True these giants make their own lives easier and don’t implement much billing controls into the infrastructure. It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. Use billing alerts, hacks, and research things carefully before jumping with both feet.
    - joepie91_ 3y ago
      > It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. This is victim blaming.

braza 3y ago

To be honest, even the official guide [1] for BG does not have any information about how to make some info about query cost, budget, and service limits mechanisms [2]. I think the HTTP Archive team could set something in that regard. PS: When I was an instructor for some cloud training in AWS, the first 2 hours were only to set up billing and budgets to avoid any kind of situation like this. No one would start training without all those locks in place in the first place. [1] - https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs

httparchive 3y ago
Yeah, I'm basically just having to write this off so it sucks for me (a lot - I'm bootstrapping a start up), but I'm more worried about other people (especially students) getting caught up in what feels like a scam given the language on the website not, ya know, mentioning the risk of being charged $14k.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I understand the argument against hard circuit-breakers (yeah, seems like a good idea, but had a good traffic spike and I'm down). But it makes even me cautious with respect to scenarios where I could just fat finger something. There are some controls but there are no guarantees in most cases.
- hobofan 3y ago
  The getting started guide linked by the website states: > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore Could this be a bigger warning? Sure. Is something a scam just because they don't explain the general implications of entering your payment information to a usage-billed product? Not really.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

darth_avocado 3y ago

I am sorry but this seems to be more of a “TLDR; didn’t read;” situation. The http archive clearly mentions that the data is available for offline processing or for querying online on BQ. And in the “Getting started” section of the instructions, it is mentioned multiple times on how BQ will charge you. And even if it wasn’t mentioned anywhere, it’s a little presumptuous to assume a tool for processing data will not charge you money for literally processing TBs of data again and again. > Note: BigQuery has a free tier that you can use to get started without enabling billing. At the time of this writing, the free tier allows 10GB of storage and 1TB of data processing per month. Google also provides a $300 credit for new accounts. > Note: The size of the tables you query are important because BigQuery is billed based on the number of processed data. There is 1TB of processed data included in the free tier, so running a full scan query on one of the larger tables can easily eat up your quota. This is where it becomes important to design queries that process only the data you wish to explore > When we look at the results of this, you can see how much data was processed during this query. Writing efficient queries limits the number of bytes processed - which is helpful since that's how BigQuery is billed. Note: There is 1TB free per month https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/docs/gettingstarted_bigquery.md https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
httparchive 3y ago
Yes, sure there's stuff I could have done better, and stayed up all night looking at the fine print. But that's not the point - this is *warning* to other people who see the Internet Archive logo, the words "public", and for some dumb reason also trust Google. I'm hoping this doesn't happen to others, I learned a costly lesson.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dabernathy89 3y ago
I'm on OP's side - even if I knew I'd be paying to run some queries against this dataset, I never would have thought it could reach 5 figures in such a short time. And you can't argue that the billing is straightforward. The "Getting Started" guide for the HTTP Archive doesn't even describe what indexes are available/commonly used for limiting the scanned rows.

jeffparsons 3y ago

Warning: most cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) require you to accept unlimited liability to use their services. If you're running a business and you have lawyers, then fair enough — just play the game. But for individuals, it seems crazy that so many of us accept this sort of thing. Good luck contesting the charge with your credit card company when you already agreed to a contract that said Google could bill you thousands of dollars and then you used thousands of dollars worth of their service. Big cloud providers are not your friend. They do not care if they destroy the lives of you and your family, unless it's happening so often that it's making mainstream news. My advice is to go and delete your cloud accounts, and only use services that offer hard spending caps, and ideally prepaid accounts. Maybe this doesn't leave many options. Oh well. Maybe if you can't afford big lawyers then you also can't afford the risks of using big cloud.

nothttparchive 3y ago
Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.
- jeffparsons 3y ago
  IANAL, but if this happened to me I would be gathering as many examples as I could of this having happened to other people. The angle being: Google knows this is a huge issue. Effectively, they know that they have (presumably accidentally) created a really dangerous trap for small players, and have chosen to do nothing about it. In some jurisdictions I think that reduces the legitimacy of their claim that you actually owe them money. EDIT: Even better, focus on the examples where Google "forgave" the debt; you could argue that those examples prove that Google knows it's at least partly their fault.
  - Affric 3y ago
    I would love to see an example of this working. I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically

neilv 3y ago

Not the same thing, but: some pre-Web Usenet programs would have warnings before "expensive" operations: > Version 4.3 patch 30 of rn’s Pnews.SH (September 5, 1986, published to support the new top-level groups) introduced the “thousands of machines” message: > > This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. -- https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14763/what-warning-was-given-on-attempting-to-post-to-usenet-circa-1990/14764#14764 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14763/wha...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bearjaws 3y ago

Had this happen (but more like $100) analyzing the GitHub dataset on GCP. Honestly I was already concerned when it was taking more than 5 minutes to return a result. Once I saw how slow it was I found my error, not querying the sample dataset that was a fraction of the size, to make sure my filtering worked.

KomoD 3y ago

How big of a query do you have to make to get charged $14k...? Isn't it billed by data transfer

Jgrubb 3y ago
No, by amount of data scanned to answer the query. This would be about 2.2PB worth of data. Partitioning matters y'all!
- KomoD 3y ago
  Ah, ok.
anon84873628 3y ago
On-demand pricing in the US charges $6.25 per TiB (and the first TiB per month is free). So $14k would be about 2,240 TiB. I wonder what sort of partitioning and clustering is used for the tables.

gelatocar 3y ago

Have you tried getting in touch with GCP to see if they would refund the charge? I've heard plenty of stories of cloud services refunding large one-off accidental spends like this one.

zmarty 3y ago
"Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever, *and they won’t remove the fee.*"

mekoka 3y ago

This is a matter of a user not having read some fine prints, which doesn't mean that they're necessarily at fault. The only way to know which of the user, httparchive.org, or Google BQ is most responsible is to know how often similar situations arise in this specific context (i.e. using BQ by way of httparchive.org).

londons_explore 3y ago

Just ask support. In almost all cases, they'll cancel the charges.

justinclift 3y ago
It's already been pointed out that they've been asked, but are refusing to cancel the charges.

Jgrubb 3y ago

BQ lesson #1 - don't select * on a gigundous dataset. Lesson #2 - if you select * on a gigundous dataset, make sure it's on your employers bill.

justinclift 3y ago
Also, only do this on your employers bill if you no longer want to be employed. If your employer is a small business and you nuke them from orbit by doing this a few times, it's unlikely to go well.

kshmir 3y ago

Just set quotas by default…

tills13 3y ago

Sorry but I can't get over the hyperbole in > This website makes it seem like this “public” dataset is for the community to use, but it is instead a for-profit money maker for Google Cloud and you can lose tens of thousands of dollars. you didn't understand what you were doing. HA's datasets are public and free. It is not a "for-profit money maker for Google Cloud". Sorry, sucks for you but blaming the restaurant when you bit off more of the steak than you can chew is not how this works.

francoismassot 3y ago

BigQuery is just too costly... Do you know if the dataset is public? We should just offer a cheap alternative and ditch BigQuery.

nomilk 3y ago

Could you explain the steps you went through that led to you using BigQuery? The reason I ask is most of us probably use GCP and only ever interact with BigQuery via GCP. But it seems your entry point was a bit different to most (e.g. seems you might have clicked on a link to GCP from HTTP Archive, or perhaps something else?). FWIW I use BigQuery a lot and as a rough guide I assume about 1c per GB scanned. So if I query a dataset that's 1TB, that's about $10. If the same data were stored on a relational db, the same query would take about a day (or at least a good part of a day). Because BigQuery returns a result so quickly (e.g. <1 minute) it can be easy to miss the insane amount of work it did to get there. So I could see someone accidentally putting that ~1min (but 1TB!) query into a loop or something, and boom, there's your $15k bill. Accidents happen. Also FWIW, I've found although the big 3 cloud's pricing is tricky (since there are so many services), I find them much better than the PaaS built on top of the big 3 clouds. My suspicion is that the PaaS's have a strong incentive to obscure their pricing because customers can typically see what their costs are (e.g. if they buy some compute from AWS at $0.16/hr and sell it for $1.40/hr, that can be seen as a bit of a rip, hence they try to obscure it). But I think the big 3 are not too bad at this practice. It really bugs me when anyone deliberately obscures their prices, and it's often an indicator of more shady practices to come.

Megustatrw 3y ago

I'm saying this for a decade now. There is no hard billing cut, people normally tell me that no one wants that because customers and service disruption but I want that I want a hard budget cutoff A VM with max settings doing crypto mining can be very expensive and adding more of them is easy. And you know what else is super hidden costly? Log digestion for metrics. Egress. Auto scaling . You can create costs for someone by just downloading their assets _a lot_

HermitX 3y ago

My view on such matters is that it's best to find a solution that has a fallback option, which usually is an open-source software. That is to say, if you choose a cloud service, it's preferable that it is built on some open-source software. This way, if the costs become uncontrollable in the end, you can still fall back to an open-source software. For instance, CelerData has built its cloud service on StarRocks, and it's said that many users have used it to replace Snowflake and Big Query. Of course, you could also opt for Elasticsearch's cloud service, and if problems arise, you can replace it with OpenSearch.

matrix2596 3y ago

I would like these APIs to have prepaid options. Then you can control your max budget. Even OPENAI doesnt have that option.

Havoc 3y ago

Here is a gigantic footgun powerful enough to nuke yourself back into the Stone Age. To learn how to use it you’ll have to try it. Learning by doing. Trial and error. And no you may not use blanks while learning use of footgun. No training wheels. No precautions. Has to be live - full send unlimited risk. Actually - here are some safety squints (billing alerts) - just to give you some illusion of control. Good luck! Yours truly big cloud

justinclift 3y ago
Fits in well with everyone's natural first query (SELECT * FROM everything), so people can see the type of data it's returning in order to narrow it down.
- everforward 3y ago
  Not specifically because of BigQuery, but I have taken to adding " LIMIT 10" to that for my default query because of accidentally locking up 10TB databases too many times.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Good thinking. :)

nathants 3y ago

there is very little reason to use services like big query. they are all insanely over priced. always use plain ec2 spot and s3. lots of smaller instances. fewer larger instances. single massive instance. whatever. fancy sql thingy, awk and grep, or whatever else. do your data processing with ephemeral spot priced compute and persist as little data as possible to s3. $2-5/hour gets an insane amount of ec2 spot. egress aside, no surprise bill is possible. empathy for op though. not a fun day. just a bump in the road though, keep on trucking!

adrianmsmith 3y ago
BigQuery is an amazing product and there are good reasons to use it. One place I worked at had a table with 100 billion rows. And some other tables as well. If a manager asked for an ad-hoc query, it was 5 minutes of writing a SQL query including JOINs (which didn't need to worry about which fields were indexed etc. e.g. you could write WHERE then a regex), and $15 and 5 minutes later I'd have the answer. Apparently 100s of VMs were started and stopped to answer that query, but it all happened automatically, at very low cost.

httparchive 3y ago

Update: Google has been helping me out now, thankfully. Hopefully we can make sure this doesn't happen to others.

dang 3y ago
Can you please pick a different username that we can rename your account to? Some users are complaining that your current username is misleading (e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447421) Edit: since I didn't hear back from you, I've consed a 'not' onto the username 'httparchive'. If you prefer a different name, feel free to contact us at hn@ycombinator.com.

renonce 3y ago

So now you say on your webpage your pricing is $1/TB or something. Great. But there is a caveat: the amount you pay depends on some complex factors such as the size of the table or the duration of your code. If the factors are so simple that no more than grade-level arithmetic is required to calculate my costs then that would be fine. But what if it gets a little bit more complex than that, such as “table size is 1PB and cost per 1TB is $1”? Did you know 1PB=1000TB rather than 0.001TB? What about “you need another $10 query to figure out the size of the table”? Or “the cost depends on number of function calls that your code makes and if you accidentally recursed yourself too many times you can’t limit it”? Or “The server is $5/mon but IP is $1/h and outbound traffic is $10/GB and if someone download something 1TB on your server you will pay $10000 within 2 hours”? At some point the factors related to billing is going to become non-trivial and every sentence in a long 10 page document could have 100x’d your costs, what makes this service different from a scam? You could have allowed me to set a billing cap so I won’t have to pay anything beyond $10, so that “$10” is everything I have to care about, could you?

handoflixue 3y ago
> At some point the factors related to billing is going to become non-trivial First response on the OG link covers this with a screenshot: the size of the query is previewed beforehand, and you have to check a checkbox to acknowledge it. (I dare say listing it in PB instead of $$$ is still a scummy move, etc. - but they do resolve about half of your concerns right there)

scotty79 3y ago

If estimated cost for is so easy to calculate why not put it in the UI? "Running this query will touch 2PB of data so you'll be charged $20000" for it..

bunbun69 3y ago
1) not easy to calculate 2) the query needs to be run to see the true cost
- scotty79 3y ago
  The person responding to complaint was quick to point out that size of data displayed in the UI relates directly to estimated cost. I see no reason this estimated cost shouldn't be shown in the UI as well.

olliej 3y ago

It's interesting that in the post there's a maintainer pointing out that there's a very tiny little checkbox that says "this will process X PB of data". Given that your account knows how much your queries cost per TB it does seem like an "dark UI" design to not just say how much the query will actually cost. Similarly that checkbox being a tiny part of the UI, and not allowing people to set up cost limits on a query (or not having them at the account level), does seem very much like an "encourage people to overspend" UX. I'm sure "overspend to the level of a $14k bill to an individual" is not intended, but that's a reasonably predictable occasional outcome for this design. So on the one hand, yes they did click a checkbox saying they were aware of the amount of data being processed, but OTOH the UI seems to be specifically designed to encourage this kind of mistake.

justinclift 3y ago

Wow. No guard rails whatsoever on queries like this? Their UI clearly has all the info needed in order to put guard rails in place (aka big scary warning dialog in red), as it's already giving a non-obvious warning about the expected data usage. Blaming users for this seems like a bastard act. Talk about causing further reputational damage... :( :( :(

nojvek 3y ago

Does it work if you use a prepaid credit card with the cloud providers that only have a set amount of money?

falling_myshkin 3y ago

i don't disagree with the premise that Google should be responsible and explicitly acknowledge that the average computer-interested person trying out bigquery has no clue how sharp of a knife it is and they actually do need to be protected from themselves. I was in this boat only a few months ago. One thing I will say though is that I think the documentation is actually quite comprehensive, and personally after taking the time to RTFM and actually understand things like columnar storage, partitioned and clustered tables, etc., I was able to optimize costs quite a bit for our use case and am quite pleased with the product overall. Just takes time to learn, it's a (necessarily imo) intricate machine.

mrkramer 3y ago

I thought you could cap(limit) your spending e.g. "if I reach $1000 in costs, abort/pause operations".