Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
BigQuery Streaming Inserts
A charge for rows written with the legacy streaming API, tabledata.insertAll, which Google now calls the Storage Write API (REST).
It is billed per 200 MiB inserted, with every row counted as at least 1 KB, so many tiny rows cost more than their size suggests. Batch loads are free, so this charge is a payment for immediacy.
Billed: Per 200 MiB of rows successfully inserted, with each row counted as at least 1 KB. No monthly free allowance. Batch loading the same data uses a free shared slot pool.
What triggers this charge
- tabledata.insertAll calls from an application or client library (insert_rows in the Python client, insertAll in Java).
- Cloud Logging sinks routed to a BigQuery dataset, which write through the legacy streaming API.
- Dataflow or Beam pipelines using the STREAMING_INSERTS write method, often the default in an older template nobody changed.
- Many small rows: each is billed as at least 1 KB, so a stream of 200-byte events is billed at five times its real size.
How to reduce it
Ask whether seconds actually matter
Most "real-time" dashboards are looked at hourly. Micro-batching into five-minute load jobs moves the data onto the free batch path, which uses a shared slot pool with no capacity guarantee.
Move to the Storage Write API (gRPC)
Google recommends it for new work: it has lower pricing, 2 TiB a month free, bills on bytes rather than a 1 KB row minimum, and supports exactly-once delivery. It is a separate charge with its own page here.
Batch tiny events before inserting
If you must stay on insertAll, combining small events into fewer, larger rows stops the 1 KB minimum inflating the billed volume.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against BigQuery pricing, the Storage Write API (REST) docs and the Cloud Logging BigQuery sink 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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