Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
BigQuery Storage Write API
A charge for data ingested through the BigQuery Storage Write API (gRPC), the recommended streaming path.
It is billed per gibibyte after 2 TiB a month free, whichever stream type writes it. The stream type changes delivery semantics, not the price.
Billed: Per gibibyte ingested through the Storage Write API (gRPC), after the first 2 TiB each month per billing account, which are free. Every stream type bills the same way.
What triggers this charge
- Applications and connectors appending through the default stream, which makes rows queryable immediately with at-least-once delivery.
- Committed-type streams, used for exactly-once delivery with stream offsets.
- Pending-type streams, which hold rows until a commit and are a common way to load in batches through the API. They bill at the same rate as the default stream.
- Dataflow and Beam pipelines using the STORAGE_WRITE_API or STORAGE_API_AT_LEAST_ONCE write methods.
- Volume beyond the free 2 TiB across the whole billing account, which is why the line often appears only once several pipelines share an account.
How to reduce it
Check whether a load job would do
Load jobs from Cloud Storage use a free shared slot pool. If the data can wait minutes, staging files and loading them avoids this charge entirely, at the cost of no capacity guarantee.
Do not choose a stream type to save money
Default, committed, pending and buffered streams bill the same. Choose by the delivery semantics you need, then reduce the bytes you send instead.
Send fewer bytes
Billing is on ingested bytes. Dropping fields nobody queries before the write, and avoiding duplicate retries with offsets on committed streams, shrinks the billed volume directly.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 20 Oct 2026, against BigQuery pricing and the Storage Write API docs.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
Related charges
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