Terms Associated with Snowflake Pricing Model

Snowflake Pricing includes storage cost for compressed data stored in Snowflake plus Snowflake credits used for consuming Snowflake resources.

A Snowflake credit is a unit of measure which is used to pay for the consumption of Snowflake resources.

Per Snowflake documentation as on creation of this blog for using virtual warehouse for standard edition, each credit costs $2.

Storage cost is $41/month/TB of data storage

Snowflake credit is consumed only when a customer is using resources, such as:

•Virtual warehouse,

•Cloud services, if Cloud Services usage is within 10% of warehouse usage hours 

•Serverless features.

Snowflake Credit - Snowflake credits are used to pay for the consumption of resources on Snowflake. A Snowflake credit is a unit of measure, and it is consumed only when a customer is using resources, such as when a virtual warehouse is running, the cloud services layer is performing work, or serverless features are used.

All Snowflake costs are based on usage of data storage, virtual warehouses (compute) resources, and cloud services:

Storage:

Usage for data storage is calculated on the daily average amount of data (in bytes) stored in the system for:

Files staged for bulk data loading/unloading (can be stored compressed or uncompressed).

Database tables, including historical data for Time Travel (always compressed by Snowflake).

Fail-safe for database tables (always compressed by Snowflake)

Clones of database tables that reference data deleted in the table that owns the clones.

Virtual Warehouse:

  Based on number of Snowflake credits consumed for executing queries – DML operations

Cloud Services:

  Only charged if daily usage of Cloud Services exceeds 10% of daily usage of compute resources

Cost for Serverless Features:

Automatic Clustering

•Snowflake managed

•Table materialized view data are distributed using this service for their optimum performance.

•Snowflake uses its own managed compute for this this service

•Services are paid for with Snowflake credits. Billed for per second usage for compute resource..

Search Optimization Service (SOS)

•Used to speed up lookup queries for large tables.

•It is paired with smaller virtual warehouses to reduce cost. 

•Services are paid for with Snowflake credits. Billed for per second usage for compute resource.

Snowpipe

•Snowflake managed to automated service for ingesting streaming data

•Does not require virtual warehouse, uses Snowflake managed compute resources

•Services are paid for with Snowflake credits. Billed for per second usage plus credit charge per file.

Database Replication

•Services to are used to replicate data across regions and cloud platforms

•Uses Snowflake managed compute resources

•Compute resources are paid for with Snowflake credits billed for per second usage plus standard storage charges and data transfer cost.

Materialized Views

•Snowflake automatically syncs Materialized views with underlying data in base table(s)

•Users have to pay for snowflake managed compute resources which is billed for per second usage and paid from Snowflake credit

Example: A small enterprise needs a warehouse for storing and analyzing daily and history data generated from their e-commerce application. No serverless features are used.

•Data format includes CSVs and JSONs.

•Average storage – 10 TB

•There are 8 analysts that run SQL queries using medium size virtual warehouse between for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week

•Batch loads run for about 3 hours 7 days a week and it requires a small size virtual warehouse

a. Cost associated with daily load:

•Per unit cost of small warehouse: $2 x 2 credits/hour = $4/hour

•Total operational hours per month: 2.5/day x 30 days = 75 hours

•Total cost: $4/hour  x 2.5 hours/day x 30 days = $300 per month

b. Cost associated with medium size virtual warehouse for 10 hours/day for 20 days a month

•Unit cost for medium size virtual warehouse: $2 x 4 credits/hour = $8/hour

•Total operational hour: 10 hours/day x 20 days = 200 hours per month

•Total cost: $8/hour x 10hours/day x 20days = $1600 per month

c. Storage cost for 10 TB: $41 x 10 = $410 per month

Total monthly cost of storage and virtual warehouse usage = $2,310 **

**  This is just for illustration purpose. The prices may vary. Please check withSnowflake Support for accurate cost.