BigQuery, safer by default from September 2025
On September 1st 2025, Google will make BigQuery a lot safer by default, changing the default quotas for projects under the default on-demand pricing model. Instead of unlimited financial damage, the default for new projects will be around $1000 per day. Existing projects will be updated to a custom limit based on prior 30-day usage. No changes to existing limits.
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I received an email entitled "[Action Advised] Review and set appropriate daily usage limit for BigQuery projects before Sep 1, 2025." yesterday. The content is a big step forward for making BigQuery safer by default. Unfortunately, Google's copyrighted the content so I can't share it in full here, and the quota documentation doesn't cover the full content, but I can summarize the key points.
New projects¶
As of September 1st, 2025, new projects using the default on-demand BigQuery pricing model will have a daily usage limit of 200TiB. The current model has no default limit, potentially leading to unlimited financial exposure - as I've written about in $1,370 Gone in Sixty Seconds, explaining how a single query could run up a bill over $1,300 in less than a minute, and in The BigQuery Safety Net, explaining how the quota system can mitigate these risks.
200TiB is still a lot, and at the $5/TiB current pricing, it's $1000 per day. Most SMEs won't be affected, but an unexpected spike could still be painful. I see no indication that any smart adjustments will be made automatically based on usage patterns, so I'll still be setting my own values for these quotas anyway.
Existing projects¶
If a project already has a quota value other than unlimited set for QueryUsagePerDay or QueryUsagePerUserPerDay, then no changes will be made. Otherwise, Google will set a quota based on usage in the last 30 days.
Auditing¶
The changes will be visible in audit logs when they occur.
Summary¶
There are a whole bunch of blog posts out there that are going to need updating!
Here are the updated BigQuery quota-related docs. BigQuery's defaults are about to get a lot safer, but could still hurt to the tune of $1000/day. I'll still be setting my own much lower values when I set up projects that use BigQuery.
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