Clunky ETL: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but what I saw about ETLs in the article "One example we encounter quite often is that Mixpanel stores timestamps in seconds, while Redshift expects timestamps in milliseconds." - that kind of transformations I would much rather run inside BigQuery in a couple seconds than going through a whole pipeline. Other things I could outside, just as what they are doing now - but I didn't see any RS specific advantages for transformations?

Cost: Cost should be way below other solutions - and to prevent problems BigQuery now has cost controls at a user and project levels: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/cost-controls

Thanks for your comments!