Scheduled deliveries & alerts
Scheduled deliveries are table stakes in any BI tool — paying a Looker seat and a BigQuery bill to email a CSV is the textbook over-engineered version.
What people actually say
✕Scheduled deliveries fire Explores against the warehouse on a recurring basis — combined with PDT rebuilds, this is where the $50,000-$200,000/year BigQuery query bill that often exceeds the Looker licence itself originates.
Source: Mammoth, Looker Pricing 2026 ↗✕Reviewers cite reliability issues with delivery and connector layers in the Looker family — broken visualisations after small upstream changes and quota-related delivery failures are recurring themes in 2026 reviews.
Source: Google Developer Forums, Looker Studio reliability ↗✕Premium support to escalate delivery and quota issues is a separate Google Cloud line item — Standard ~$29/month, Advanced ~$100/month, Premium ~$15,000/month — on top of the Looker platform fee.
Source: Shearwater Data, Looker Pricing Breakdown ↗
Scheduled deliveries run as Inngest or BullMQ jobs that hit your dbt models, render a chart or CSV, and post it to Slack or send via Resend/SES. Alerting is a SQL threshold check on a schedule — no PDT rebuild storm, no per-delivery quota, no $15k/month Premium support tier to file a ticket against.