GIS Analytics Cost Comparison
BigQuery vs Snowflake vs Wherobots vs PostGIS on the same workload.
Summary
| # | Engine | Monthly cost | Managed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BigQuery | ~$400 | Yes |
| 2 | Wherobots | ~$410 | Yes |
| 3 | Hetzner PostGIS | ~$500 | No (self-hosted) |
| 4 | Snowflake (Small WH) | ~$1,000 | Yes |
| 5 | Cloud SQL PostGIS | ~$3,500 | Yes |
Assumptions
Fixed scenario for all engines:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Team size | 10 analysts, 6-8 hours/day |
| Queries per analyst | 15/day (analytical + batch) |
| Total queries | 150/day |
| Avg data scanned/query | 12 GiB (well-pruned spatial analytics) |
| Working days | 22/month |
| Data scanned/month | ~39.6 TiB |
| Dataset | Overture Maps, ~7 TB compressed (Parquet) |
BigQuery - ~$400/month
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 7 TB x $0.02/GB/month | $140 |
| Queries (on-demand) | 38.6 TiB x $6.25/TiB (first 1 TiB free) | $241 |
| Total | ~$400 |
See how BigQuery spatial queries look in practice: BigQuery map examples in Dekart.
Wherobots - ~$410/month
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | 165 SU-hours x $1.50/SU-hour (US) | $248 |
| Storage (S3) | 7,000 GB x $0.023/GB | $161 |
| Total | ~$410 |
1 SU = 32 vCPU Spark/Sedona cluster. 150 queries/day x 3 min each = 7.5 SU-hours/day x 22 days = 165 SU-hours/month. $300/month minimum on Professional plan.
Hetzner PostGIS - ~$500/month
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server | AX102: 16 cores, 128 GB DDR5, 2x 1.92 TB NVMe | $115 (€104) |
| Additional NVMe | 2x 7.68 TB for ~10 TB Postgres data | $205 (€186) |
| Backups | WAL-G to S3-compatible, ~7-10 TB | $180 |
| Total | ~$500 |
You own all ops: upgrades, PostGIS extensions, monitoring, failover, no SLA.
Snowflake - ~$1,000/month
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 7 TB x $23/TB | $161 |
| Compute | 264 credits x $3/credit (Enterprise) | $792 |
| Total | ~$1,000 |
Small WH = 2 credits/hour. 6 hours/day x 22 days = 132 hours x 2 = 264 credits. Medium WH doubles the cost.
See Snowflake spatial queries in action: Snowflake Kepler.gl map examples.
Cloud SQL PostGIS - ~$3,500/month
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storage (SSD) | 10 TB x $0.22/GB (incl. indexes/bloat) | $2,200 |
| Compute | 8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM, 24x7 | $518 |
| Backups | 10 TB x $0.08/GB | $800 |
| Total | ~$3,500 |
SSD storage pricing makes Cloud SQL brutal for large datasets. Built for OLTP, not planetary analytics.
Key takeaways
- BigQuery is cheapest fully-managed. Pay per bytes scanned - well-clustered tables with partition pruning keep costs low.
- Wherobots is similar cost, serverless, geo-specialized. Better for heavy spatial joins.
- Hetzner is cheap raw metal, but you own everything.
- Snowflake is ~2.5x more because you pay for warehouse time, not bytes.
- Cloud SQL PostGIS is 8x more expensive than BigQuery at planet scale.
Pragmatic architecture: BigQuery or Wherobots for planetary analytics + small PostGIS for low-latency APIs.
Caveats
- Published list prices, no committed-use discounts applied
- Egress costs not included
- HA/replication doubles PostGIS costs
- Query pruning efficiency varies - these assume well-optimized spatial queries
Try it yourself
- Overture Maps examples - interactive maps built with Dekart on Overture data
- BigQuery map examples - large-scale datasets visualized
- Snowflake map examples - Snowflake spatial queries rendered on a map
- BigQuery vs Snowflake GIS performance - query speed and cost benchmarks
- Try Dekart Cloud free - paste SQL, get a map