Snowflake Pricing Model Explained

April 11, 2025

🧊 1. Compute Costs (Virtual Warehouses)

This is often the most significant cost in Snowflake. Compute is billed based on the time virtual warehouses are running and the size of the warehouse.

Virtual Warehouses are clusters of compute resources that perform queries.

Sizes range from X-Small to 6X-Large (XS, S, M, L, XL, etc.), and costs scale exponentially with size.

Charged per-second, with a 60-second minimum per run.

Compute credits are consumed only when warehouses are running (paused ones don’t consume credits).

Auto-suspend and auto-resume features help control costs.

💡 Example: A Medium warehouse uses 4 credits per hour. If it runs for 15 minutes, you’re charged 1 credit.

🗃️ 2. Storage Costs

Charged based on the amount of data stored, measured in terabytes (TB) per month.

Storage includes your raw data, staged files, and time-travel data (historical snapshots).

Costs depend on the cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP), but it’s roughly $23–$40 per TB per month.

Time Travel and Fail-safe features store additional copies for recovery — they can increase storage usage.

🧠 3. Cloud Services Costs

This covers things like:

Query optimization

Metadata management

Authentication and access control

Infrastructure coordination

These are billed separately but are usually a small fraction of total cost (5-10%).

📦 Pricing Editions

Snowflake offers different editions (tiers), each adding features and support levels:

Edition Use Case / Highlights

Standard Core features, best for most users

Enterprise Additional security & governance features

Business Critical Enhanced data protection & compliance

VPS (Virtual Private Snowflake) Dedicated infrastructure, highest isolation

💳 Snowflake Credits

Snowflake’s pricing revolves around credits:

1 credit = ~$2 to $4 (varies by region and contract)

You purchase credits and then consume them as you use compute resources

🧮 Example Cost Calculation

Let’s say you:

Use a Large warehouse (8 credits/hr)

It runs for 2 hours/day for a month → 8 x 2 x 30 = 480 credits

Store 2 TB of data → ~$46–$80/month

You’ll pay for 480 credits + storage

🔧 Cost Control Tips

Enable auto-suspend and auto-resume on warehouses

Use smaller warehouses for light workloads

Monitor with resource monitors to avoid overruns

Use materialized views and caching wisely

Want help estimating a specific workload’s cost? Just tell me your usage scenario (data size, queries per day, warehouse size, etc.) and I’ll help you model it.

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