You should pay in dollars on Google BigQuery (and GCP)

Financial Operations (FinOps) teams are constantly seeking strategies to optimize cloud spending and financial efficiency. Google BigQuery, a leading data warehouse solution that is part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offers various billing options. Among these, paying in U.S. dollars (USD) presents unique advantages. Here's why FinOps should consider using USD for their Google BigQuery transactions.

Understanding the GCP pricing

GCP has a very transparent pricing system that allows to anticipate future invoices. Prices for each service are announced on this page.

For example, the price of Google BigQuery on-demand in multi-region US and EU is 6.25 USD per scanned tebibyte.

Understanding the billing console

The GCP billing console helps you understand how services are billed. Go to Billing Console > Report and group results by SKU. For each service, you'll get the total invoiced and the unit of calculation. For example, the following screenshot shows the measured tebibytes.

🚨 Non-USD pricing fluctuates every month

If you change the Billing Currency, the price changes to 5.7784375 EUR per 1 tebibyte. The price in USD is the price that was announced by GCP at the time of the general pricing increases in July 2023, however prices in EUR, may vary every month, without further announcement. Below are examples of pricing changes in EUR.

These variations are possible as indicated by GCP.

💰 Conclusion

In conclusion, using U.S. dollars (USD) for transactions on Google BigQuery and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers significant advantages for Financial Operations (FinOps) teams. The stability and predictability of USD billing help FinOps manage and forecast cloud expenditures more effectively, avoiding the complications of currency fluctuations. Opting for USD is a strategic choice for streamlined financial planning and control.