Many people thought it was free until they got the €9,000 bill from Google Cloud.
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 |
Imagine writing a line of code (programming), pressing “Enter,” and shortly afterward receiving a bill for the equivalent of a compact car. That’s exactly what happened to Tim, a user who decided to explore a public dataset hosted on the Google cloud. What he thought would be a harmless query ended with an unpleasant surprise: a bill for $14,000 , or about €9,000.
- Unsuspecting users face unexpected charges after using cloud services.
Tim’s mistake, he thought it was free
Tim became interested in the HTTP Archive, a massive public dataset about the history of the internet . The archive is hosted on Google Cloud, within the BigQuery platform, and is publicly available. But what many don’t know (and Tim learned the hard way) is that while the data is accessible free of charge, querying and processing it isn’t. “I ran a script with HTTP archive data, and suddenly the bill went up to $14,000. Google didn’t waive the fee ,” Tim explained to Norwegian outlet Kode24.
The anecdote has sparked a debate about transparency in cloud computing services. Platforms like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure offer powerful tools for working with large-scale data, but their pricing structures can be complex and unintuitive for those without prior experience.
Following the uproar, the HTTP Archive website has been updated to explicitly warn about the costs that can be incurred when using BigQuery . But Tim’s case is not isolated. Many users in Denmark and other countries have reported unexpected bills after using services they assumed were free.
Lessons from the Tim case
Experts stress the importance of:
- Always review the pricing policy before using cloud services.
- Set usage limits or spending alerts within your Google Cloud account.
- Read the terms and conditions carefully, even when dealing with “public” data.
The moral of the story is clear: in the cloud, what seems free can have a hidden cost. Without warning. And that cost can reach several figures. Before giving in to curiosity or a user-friendly interface, it’s worth pausing, checking the prices, and preventing a data experiment from turning into an unexpected debt . Because in the digital age, clicking “Enter” can be very, very expensive.
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