BigQuery Cost Audit
Do you know which queries and tables are driving your BigQuery bill?
Cut your BigQuery bill without slowing anyone down
We review 30 days of BigQuery history to identify cost drivers and give your data team prioritized fixes. Fixed price, results in about two weeks, nothing paid upfront.
- Price
- From $2,500, fixed
- Timeline
- About 2 weeks
- Looks at
- 30 days of job history
- Reads
- Metadata and billing data only
- Your team's time
- About 2 hours in total
- Payment
- Nothing upfront, two invoices
Is this right for you?
A good fit if
- You spend $5,000 or more a month on BigQuery and it is growing faster than your data team.
- You are deciding between BigQuery on-demand and editions, or whether to buy slot commitments. If that is the whole question, see BigQuery Slot Management.
- A handful of dashboards, dbt models or scheduled queries seem to drive most of the bill, and nobody is sure which.
- Your data team wants to keep shipping, without a finance-led freeze.
Probably not for you if
- You run mainly on Snowflake or Databricks, which we do not audit today. Redshift is covered by the Cloud Cost Audit.
- You want someone to change reservations without your team reviewing it.
What you walk away with
The real cost drivers, named
Cost by project, user, service account and query pattern, so you know exactly where the money goes.
The right pricing model
A clear answer on on-demand versus editions, slot sizing and commitments.
Fixes your data team can ship
Ranked changes, from partitioning and clustering to storage billing and query rewrites, each with its estimated saving.
What is included
What every package covers. Each package under Pricing says how much of your estate it includes.
BigQuery query and job analysis
30 days of job history per project: the most expensive users, service accounts and repeated query patterns, and what each costs.
BigQuery slots and editions
On-demand versus Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, slot sizing from your real usage percentiles, idle reserved slots and commitment options.
BigQuery tables and storage
Cold and unused tables, queries missing partition filters, missing partition expiration, partitioning and clustering candidates, and the logical versus physical storage billing choice per dataset.
What we hand over
- Findings workbook (Excel) ranked by saving, with owners
- Pricing model recommendation: on-demand, editions or slots
- Rewritten SQL for your costliest query patterns (Standard and Complete)
- Guardrails checklist with the exact settings to apply
- 60-minute readout with your data platform team
Everything else that is included
Cost by workload
Dashboards, dbt models and scheduled queries grouped by service account, labels and query pattern, so each workload shows up as one line with its own cost.
Guardrails
The quotas, maximum-bytes-billed limits, budgets and alerts that stop the next runaway query.
Pricing
Three fixed-fee packages, sized by scope. Nothing is paid upfront.
Focused
Up to 5 BigQuery projects
$2,500USD, one-time
Typical spend: $5,000 to $25,000 a month
- Full query, storage and compute analysis
- Findings workbook ranked by saving
- Pricing model recommendation
- 60-minute readout call
Standard
Up to 20 BigQuery projects
$5,000USD, one-time
Typical spend: $20,000 to $100,000 a month
- Everything in Focused
- Rewritten SQL for your 10 costliest query patterns
- Slot and commitment plan
- Guardrails checklist with exact settings
- 30 days of email follow-up
Complete
Up to 50 BigQuery projects
$7,500USD, one-time
Typical spend: $75,000 a month and up
- Everything in Standard
- A working session to apply the guardrails with your team
- A second analysis after 30 days showing what changed
Terms. One fixed fee per audit, agreed before we start, with no upfront payment: 50% is invoiced when the analysis is complete and the first findings are shared, about day 8, and 50% after the readout. Pay by card or bank transfer. Prices are in US dollars and exclude applicable taxes.
- Larger estate? Book a call and we will quote it.
- Start FinOps-as-a-Service within 60 days and the full audit fee is credited to your retainer.
- Start BigQuery Cost Guardrails Setup or BigQuery Slot Management within 60 days of this audit, and it is 15% off.
- Take the Cloud Cost Audit and the BigQuery Cost Audit together, and both are 15% off.
Twice the fee, or your money back
If the audit does not identify at least twice its fee in annual savings, estimated conservatively from your own usage data, we refund the fee in full. It is written into your order, and you keep the workbook either way.
How ordering worksFour steps
We reply within one business day
With times for a free 30-minute scoping call, or straight away with the order if your email already tells us enough.
You get a one-page order
It confirms the package, scope, dates, price and when each invoice is due. Nothing is binding until you sign it, and we sign your NDA first if you have one.
Kickoff
We send the access steps and your secure upload links, and the work starts on the agreed date.
Nothing paid upfront
The fee is invoiced in two halves: 50% at the milestone your order names, usually about halfway, and 50% on completion. Card or bank transfer.
Which BigQuery service?
Three services for BigQuery, and what each one leaves you with.
| Compare | BigQuery Cost Audit (this page) | BigQuery Cost Guardrails Setup | BigQuery Slot Management |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | What drives our BigQuery bill, and what should we fix first? | How do we stop a runaway query reaching the invoice? | Should each project be on-demand or slots, and how big? |
| What you get | Ranked fixes across queries, storage and slots | Quotas, byte limits, alerts and table fixes, applied and tested with you | Reservations configured with you and tuned for 60 to 90 days |
| How long | About 2 weeks | 1 to 4 weeks, then a 30-day check | 2 weeks, then 60 to 90 days of tuning |
| Price | From $2,500, fixed | From $1,500, fixed | From $1,500, fixed |
| If you buy it first | Fee credited in full to FinOps-as-a-Service within 60 days; Guardrails or Slot Management 15% off within 60 days | Fee credited in full against the Cost Audit within 60 days, or both together 15% off | Fee credited in full to FinOps-as-a-Service within 60 days |
- BigQuery Cost Audit (this page)
- The question it answers
- What drives our BigQuery bill, and what should we fix first?
- What you get
- Ranked fixes across queries, storage and slots
- How long
- About 2 weeks
- Price
- From $2,500, fixed
- If you buy it first
- Fee credited in full to FinOps-as-a-Service within 60 days; Guardrails or Slot Management 15% off within 60 days
- BigQuery Cost Guardrails Setup
- The question it answers
- How do we stop a runaway query reaching the invoice?
- What you get
- Quotas, byte limits, alerts and table fixes, applied and tested with you
- How long
- 1 to 4 weeks, then a 30-day check
- Price
- From $1,500, fixed
- If you buy it first
- Fee credited in full against the Cost Audit within 60 days, or both together 15% off
- BigQuery Slot Management
- The question it answers
- Should each project be on-demand or slots, and how big?
- What you get
- Reservations configured with you and tuned for 60 to 90 days
- How long
- 2 weeks, then 60 to 90 days of tuning
- Price
- From $1,500, fixed
- If you buy it first
- Fee credited in full to FinOps-as-a-Service within 60 days
How it works
Your team's time: about 2 hours in total, for access or exports and the readout.
Day 0
Free scoping call
Thirty minutes on your projects and goals. You get a one-page order that matches a package.
Day 1
Grant access, or send the exports
For BigQuery, viewer roles granted to a dedicated Finitizer reader identity per project, or an export of the job, storage and reservation history listed under "The data we need from you".
Days 2 to 8
Analysis
We analyze 30 days of history, then a practitioner reviews every finding and prices it against your bill.
Days 8 to 10
Fixes and pricing plan
Ranked fixes, the pricing model recommendation and, on Standard and Complete, rewritten SQL for your costliest patterns.
Days 10 to 14
Readout
A walkthrough with your data team, then email follow-up while you ship the first changes.
Data, access and security
What we need from you, what we can see, and what your security and procurement teams usually ask.
The data we need from you
The audit runs on 30 days of metadata about your jobs, tables and slots. You can grant us read access and we collect it, or export it yourself and upload it. Either way, the analysis cannot start without it.
What to send, and how it reaches us
- BigQuery, if you grant access: BigQuery Resource Viewer and Metadata Viewer on each project in scope, plus Resource Viewer on your reservation administration project if you use editions. We read the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views ourselves.
- BigQuery, if you export instead: for each project, the last 30 days of INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS_BY_PROJECT (query text, user, bytes billed, slot milliseconds), plus TABLE_STORAGE and the partitioning and clustering columns from COLUMNS, as Parquet files. If you use editions, also the reservation views from the administration project.
- Recommended either way: the BigQuery lines of your Cloud Billing export for the last three full months, so findings are priced at what you pay rather than list prices.
How it reaches us: Exports go through a secure, customer-specific upload link we send you at kickoff. Uploaded files are stored encrypted in Finitizer's Google Cloud environment in the US, used only for your engagement, deleted automatically 90 days after upload, and deleted sooner on request. Query text and user names are used only to attribute cost.
Access and security
We read job, query and table metadata. We never read the data in your tables, and we never delete anything.
How access works
- BigQuery: viewer roles granted per project to a dedicated Finitizer reader identity, using short-lived impersonation tokens. No keys are created, and no organization-level role is needed.
- BigQuery Resource Viewer and Metadata Viewer are required on each project in scope. If you use editions, Resource Viewer on the reservation administration project as well; it reads reservations and commitments and cannot change them.
- BigQuery job history includes query text and the user who ran each job. We use them to attribute cost, keep them in a dedicated dataset for your company, and delete them within 90 days after the engagement ends, or sooner on request.
Cannot grant access yet? For BigQuery, run the free BigQuery Cost Check at tools.finitizer.com/bigquery-cost-check. You run three read-only queries yourself and the report is computed in your browser; we can start the conversation from its results.
Security reviews and procurement
Security review support
We sign your NDA before access or data is shared, provide the roles and policies in advance, and can complete your security questionnaire.
Clear contracting
A one-page order confirms the package, scope, dates, price, and invoice milestones before work starts.
Corporate purchasing
Nothing is paid upfront. Invoices can be paid by card or bank transfer, and we can work with a purchase order.
Who does the work
A team of FinOps Engineers and FinOps Practitioners. The Finitizer platform does the scanning; the team does the judgment, and every finding is reviewed, priced and explained by a person before you see it.
FinOps Engineers
Connect the read-only access, run the analysis on the Finitizer platform, write the Terraform changes, SQL rewrites and reservation commands, and check every number against your bill.
FinOps Practitioners
FinOps-certified. Review and rank every finding, run your review calls and readouts, build the reporting and the practice around it, and lead the training.
Frequently asked questions
Do you read the data in our tables?
No. We read job and query metadata, table metadata and slot usage. BigQuery job history does include query text and user names, which we use only to attribute cost.
Will your analysis increase our BigQuery bill?
Barely. We read INFORMATION_SCHEMA job and storage views, which process a small amount of metadata; for most estates the whole audit costs a few dollars of query time.
Will we see savings before the audit ends?
Often, yes. Safe quick wins such as expiring old partitions, switching a dataset to physical storage billing or capping bytes billed are flagged as soon as we find them.
Should we move from on-demand to BigQuery editions?
It depends on how steady your usage is. We size slots from your real usage percentiles and show the monthly cost of each option side by side, including commitments, so the choice is a number rather than a guess.
Do you need organization-level access in Google Cloud?
No. Roles are granted per project, and we read job history project by project.
More questions
Our costs come from Looker, dbt and BI tools. Can you still attribute them?
Yes. We group work by service account, labels and repeated query pattern, so a dashboard or a dbt model shows up as one line with its own cost.
Will you change our reservations or queries?
No. We recommend and, on Standard and Complete, rewrite the SQL. Your team applies the changes. On Complete we work alongside you while you set up the guardrails.
Will you sign an NDA and complete our security questionnaire?
Yes. We sign your NDA before any access is granted, send the exact roles we need in advance, and complete your security questionnaire. Our SOC 2 program is in progress.
Do you audit Snowflake or Databricks?
Not today. If you are comparing warehouses, the free warehouse cost translator at tools.finitizer.com/warehouse-cost-translator may help.
Can we export the data instead of granting access?
Yes. The Data upload help page, linked under "The data we need from you", has the exact queries for the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views. Export them as Parquet files and upload them through the secure link we send you. Granting access is quicker and lets us re-run the analysis on Complete; exporting keeps everything in your hands.
How do we pay?
Nothing is paid upfront. Half the fee is invoiced when the analysis is complete and the first findings are shared, about day 8, and the other half after the readout. Invoices can be paid by card or bank transfer, and we can work with a purchase order.