How does BigQuery pricing work and what should you budget?
Google bills for two things: the data you store, and the data each query scans. The first 1 TiB of queries and 10 GiB of storage are free every month, which covers many small sites. Costs grow with how much you scan, so we select only the columns we need and can cap what a single query is allowed to cost. Prices change and vary by region, so check Google's pricing page for the current numbers.
What BigQuery costs
Google bills for two things: the data you store, and the data each query scans. The first 1 TiB of queries and 10 GiB of storage are free every month, which covers many small sites.
Past that, costs grow with how much you scan. We select only the columns we need, and a query can be capped so it can't run up a bill. Streaming GA4 data in is an extra charge per GB, so it is worth turning on only when same-day numbers matter.
Prices change and vary by region, so check Google's pricing page for the current numbers.
Where this came up in our work
- Client work
The Therapy Lounge
70% more enquiries, 6.6x return on ad spend in October 2025, and 316 enquiries tracked from April 2025 to October 2026.
Read the story - Client work
Belrose Group
A self-storage investment, development and consulting firm got a new Webflow site with a page for each of its three divisions, a lead funnel it trusted, and its investor portal moved to a new platform.
Read the story
Also worth asking
Other answers about the same tools.
What’s the difference between an essential, advanced, and enterprise funnel?
An essential funnel covers the basics: a foundational website, essential tracking and one way to capture leads. Advanced adds multi-platform ads, automated nurturing and deeper analytics. Enterprise adds segmentation, a customer data warehouse and deep CRM integration.
How do you integrate GA4 with other marketing tools and platforms?
GA4 links to Google Ads and BigQuery from its Admin screen, and Tag Manager sends it the events. On sites that spend on ads a server container feeds it, and the raw events go to BigQuery, where we can join them to your CRM. Looker Studio reads it for the reports.
It's part of our technical tracking service.
How do you ensure data privacy and compliance when using BigQuery?
The controls are the region the data is stored in, who has access to each dataset, and how long data is kept. We keep personal data out of GA4, so only a visitor ID and a click ID go in, and we're stricter again on health sites.
We also turn off the default expiry on raw event data, so what you collect stays until you choose to delete it. Our technical tracking service sets up the access and retention with you.
What machine learning capabilities does BigQuery offer for marketing?
BigQuery ML lets you build models, such as churn or lead scoring, using SQL. We haven't built one for a client. What we've put on top of BigQuery is AI that reads clean, joined data.
We've built a tool in which Gemini reads a lead's journey from BigQuery, writes it up in plain English and answers follow-up questions on the same data.
How does BigQuery compare to other analytics platforms for marketing?
GA4's reports give you a ready-made summary, which is all many sites need. BigQuery gives you the rows behind it, and you ask your own questions in SQL.
If you only want to see traffic and channels, stay in GA4. If you want to join visits to leads, or keep the raw events in your own project for as long as you choose, add BigQuery.
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