BigQuery costs
BigQuery cost monitoring that tells you what to fix
Cost Guard reads your Google Cloud project's BigQuery job history every 15 minutes and shows what it costs by day and by source — PipeKeel's pipelines, Looker Studio reports, scheduled queries, dbt, service accounts and people — with the costliest jobs and repeated queries, what to fix, and the daily quotas that stop a runaway query. It alerts on an expensive hour or a spent daily budget, and reads job metadata only: never your tables or your query text.
How it works
Set up Sovereign execution
Cost Guard works on a Sovereign environment — one that runs in your own Google Cloud project.
Switch it on and run the script
PipeKeel shows a short gcloud or Terraform script that creates a separate service account with a custom role of two permissions: list the project's jobs and run its read of job history. Your pipeline account gets nothing new.
See 30 days at once
The first check reads the last 30 days, so the report is useful straight away: spend by day and source, who spends most, the costliest jobs and the queries that run again and again.
Get alerts
Set an hourly spike in dollars (or a multiple of your usual hour) and a daily budget; alerts go to email, Slack or a webhook — a spike at most once an hour, the budget once a day.
What you get
- Every query job in the project, not only PipeKeel's — Looker Studio reports by report, scheduled queries, dbt, service accounts and people
- The costliest jobs with what's wrong — SELECT *, no WHERE, LIMIT without a filter — and a link to each in your own BigQuery console
- Repeated queries worth building into a small table, and Looker Studio advice
- Recommended daily query quotas per user and per project, and a tighter byte cap for PipeKeel pipelines
- On-demand spend in dollars at your price per TiB; reservation jobs counted in slot-hours
- Its own narrow, opt-in permission; only totals and job ids reach PipeKeel, never query text or table data
- On every paid plan and the 14-day trial — or try the free bill autopsy first
Questions
How do I find out what's driving my BigQuery bill?
Cost Guard groups every job in your project by source and by who ran it, and ranks the costliest jobs and repeated queries with a fix for each. For a one-off look without signing up, the free BigQuery bill autopsy runs one read-only query in your console and analyses the result in your browser.
Can I get an alert when BigQuery spend spikes?
Yes. Cost Guard checks every 15 minutes and alerts when an hour costs more than an amount you set, or several times your usual hour, and when a daily budget is spent — by email, Slack or webhook.
Does Cost Guard read my data or my queries?
No. It reads the project's job history (INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS_BY_PROJECT) inside BigQuery and returns totals and job ids only; checks such as SELECT * are worked out inside BigQuery, so query text never reaches PipeKeel. It uses its own service account, not your pipelines'.
What does Cost Guard cost to run?
Its reads of job history are small BigQuery queries on your own bill — usually BigQuery's 10 MB minimum, about $0.20 a month — capped at 20 GiB each and shown in the report as Cost Guard's own scans. Cost Guard itself is included in every paid plan and the trial.
Start with the Team plan, free for 14 days
Then keep a free plan, or choose a paid one. No credit card.