BigQuery : Why Your 5-Second BigQuery Query Isn’t Cheap (dataengineerthings.org)
dataengineerthings.orgBigQuery pricing centers on slots, the basic units of compute. While on-demand billing charges for data scanned from storage, flat-rate models rent these workers directly. If a query runs for 5 seconds and uses 1,000 slots, that is 5,000 slot-seconds of compute.