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Comment by gsanderson | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I agree batching inserts would indeed be a good idea and it makes sense that's recommended. However that link you mention (as of now) does not specify what a write unit is. So if that could be clarified, that would be great. Since from your reply it sounds like one INSERT would indeed (at a minimum) incur one write unit. And thus 100 writes could indeed cost $1.25. Which could get expensive, fast.

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An INSERT can consume less than one write unit, depending on how many rows and bytes it writes to how many partitions, columns, materialized views, data types, etc. So, a "write unit", which corresponds to hundreds of low-level write operations, typically translates to many batched INSERTS. We are working to improve our examples in the FAQ to clarify - thank you so much for asking the question!

You know what would be really helpful? Some tooling around measuring "write units", like a fake local ClickHouseCloud API you could submit a write to and see how many "write units" that particular write would take. Of course, that would make pricing transparent and easy and SaaS companies don't seem like that. I challenge you folks to actually figure out a way to prevent surprise bills, until then all this "write unit" stuff is bullshit.

> We are working to improve our examples in the FAQ to clarify

Based on the comments here, and my own confusion, I think figuring out a different way of billing read/write operations is in order.

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