A complete guide to Snowflake pricing in 2025

Snowflake is a beast of a data platform, but let’s be honest, figuring out its pricing can be a real headache. With terms like "credits," "virtual warehouses," and "per-second billing" flying around, it’s easy to feel like you need a decoder ring just to understand your monthly bill.

If you’ve ever looked at a Snowflake invoice and felt a little lost, you’re definitely not alone. Many teams are drawn to Snowflake’s power and flexibility but get hesitant when they see its usage-based model. This guide is here to be your decoder ring. We’re going to pull back the curtain on every part of Snowflake pricing, from the main cost drivers to the different plans you can choose. By the end, you’ll know exactly what you’re paying for and have the confidence to manage your spending without any nasty surprises.

What is Snowflake and how does it impact pricing?

At its heart, Snowflake is a cloud data platform that handles storing and analyzing huge amounts of data without making you manage any of the hardware. What really sets it apart is a clever architecture that splits storage from compute resources.

What does that actually mean for you? In old-school data warehouses, storage and processing power were tied together. If you needed more processing power, you had to upgrade the whole system, storage and all. Snowflake lets you scale them separately. You can spin up a massive amount of processing power for a complex job and then shut it right back down when you’re done, all while your stored data costs remain low and stable. This separation is the key to Snowflake’s flexible, pay-for-what-you-use pricing.

The three core components of Snowflake pricing

When you get your bill from Snowflake, it’s really just adding up three things: compute, storage, and data transfer. Getting a handle on how each one works is the first real step to mastering your costs.

Understanding compute costs

This is the big one. Compute is usually the largest slice of your Snowflake pie, and it’s all measured in a special currency: "credits."

What are Snowflake credits?

A Snowflake Credit is just a unit that measures how much processing you’ve used. Think of it like a gallon of gas for your car; you’re billed for how many credits your "engine" burns through. The cash price for a credit isn’t the same for everyone. It depends on which Snowflake Edition you have (like Standard or Enterprise), your cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and even the physical region where your data is hosted.

Virtual warehouse pricing

In the world of Snowflake, any work you do, from running a simple query to loading a massive new dataset, happens inside something called a "virtual warehouse." It’s just a cluster of servers that does the heavy lifting. The most important thing to know is that these warehouses only use up credits when they’re actually awake and working.

Snowflake bills you by the second, which is fantastic for saving money. But there’s one tiny catch: you’re charged for a minimum of 60 seconds every time a warehouse wakes up from being suspended. This means even if a query takes 10 seconds, you’re billed for a full minute. It sounds small, but these little moments can add up if warehouses are constantly starting and stopping throughout the day.

How fast a warehouse burns through credits is all about its size. Bigger warehouses get work done faster, but they also cost more per hour.

Serverless and cloud services costs

On top of the warehouses you manage, Snowflake has some features that run on their own compute resources, which they call "serverless." Things like Snowpipe (for continuous data loading) or the Search Optimization Service fall into this category. These also use credits, but you don’t have to manage the warehouses yourself.

Then there’s the "Cloud Services" layer, which is basically Snowflake’s brain. It takes care of security, managing your data, planning your queries, and all the other background tasks. This layer uses credits too, but Snowflake gives you a generous free tier. You’ll only see a charge for it if its daily credit usage is more than 10% of your daily virtual warehouse usage. Honestly, most people never hit this limit.

Understanding storage costs

Next up is storage, which is thankfully much simpler to understand. It’s billed separately from compute, and you pay a flat monthly fee for each terabyte (TB) of data you store. The final number is based on the average amount of data you had stored each day over the course of the month.

A great built-in money-saver here is that Snowflake automatically compresses all your data before storing it. This means you’re only paying for the smaller, compressed size, not the original raw file size. Your total storage cost covers a few different types of data:

• Active data: The information sitting in your database tables.

• Staged files: Any files you’ve uploaded to Snowflake’s staging area that haven’t been loaded into a table yet.

• Historical data: Snowflake has features called Time Travel and Fail-safe that keep old versions of your data around in case you need to restore something. This is super useful, but that historical data does count toward your storage total.

The price per terabyte depends on your payment model. If you pay as you go (on-demand), storage runs about $40 per TB per month in the US. If you sign a contract and prepay for capacity, that cost can drop to around $23 per TB.

Understanding data transfer costs

Last but not least, you’ve got data transfer costs, basically, fees for moving data out of Snowflake.

The best part? Getting data into Snowflake (ingress) is totally free. You can load as much as you want without paying a dime in transfer fees.

Charges only apply when you move data out (egress). This usually happens in a couple of situations:

1. Copying data from your Snowflake account to another region (for example, from a server in the US to one in Europe).

2. Moving data to a different cloud entirely (like from Snowflake running on AWS to an application you have running on Azure).

There’s one important exception: you are not charged for pulling query results back to your own computer or BI tool. So you don’t have to worry about running up a bill just by doing your daily analysis.

How to choose the right Snowflake pricing plan

Okay, you know how the charges are calculated. Now, how do you put it all together? Picking the right plan comes down to two choices: your "edition" and your payment model.

Snowflake pricing editions: Standard vs. Enterprise vs. Business Critical

Snowflake comes in a few different tiers, or "editions." Each step up adds more advanced features and comes with a higher price per credit.

• Standard Edition: This is your starting point. It has all the core stuff you need, but with some limits, like only being able to look back at one day of data history with the Time Travel feature. It’s great for smaller teams or straightforward projects.

• Enterprise Edition: This is the sweet spot for most growing companies. It adds some serious horsepower, like multi-cluster warehouses to handle lots of simultaneous users without slowdowns, and it bumps Time Travel up to a full 90 days.

• Business Critical Edition: This is the Fort Knox version. It’s built for industries like finance or healthcare that have to meet strict security and compliance rules. It adds features like private network connections and the ability to have your database automatically failover to another region in case of an outage.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

Snowflake pricing payment models: On-demand vs. pre-purchased capacity

Once you’ve picked your edition, you have to decide how you want to pay. Think of it like a cell phone plan: you can pay more per month with no contract, or you can commit for a year or two and get a much better rate.

• On-Demand: This is the pay-as-you-go route. You don’t have to commit to anything, but you’ll pay the full list price for credits and storage. It’s a perfect way to start when you’re still figuring out your usage patterns.

• Pre-Purchased Capacity: With this model, you commit to a certain amount of annual spending upfront. In return, Snowflake gives you a hefty discount on your credit and storage costs. As soon as your workload becomes predictable, switching to a capacity plan is the single biggest move you can make to lower your bill.

Practical strategies to control your Snowflake pricing

Knowing how Snowflake pricing works is half the battle. Actively managing it is the other. Here are a few simple things you can do to keep your spending from getting out of control.

Put your warehouses to sleep (aggressively)

This one is non-negotiable. Go into your warehouse settings and set the auto-suspend timer to something low, like 5 or 10 minutes. This tells the warehouse to automatically shut itself off after a short period of inactivity. It’s the easiest way to make sure you’re not paying for compute power when nobody is even using it.

Find the ‘just right’ warehouse size

It’s tempting to throw a huge X-Large warehouse at a problem, but that’s often overkill. Start small (like, X-Small small) and see how it performs. You might be surprised how little power you actually need. Remember, a larger warehouse costs more per minute but also finishes jobs faster. Run a few tests with your common queries to find that Goldilocks size that balances speed and cost.

Set up a budget alarm

Think of this as a safety net for your wallet. Snowflake lets you create "resource monitors" that track your credit usage. You can set one up to send you an email alert when you hit, say, 75% of your monthly budget. You can even have it automatically suspend all your warehouses if you hit 100%, preventing a runaway query from causing a budget disaster.

Write smarter, not harder queries

A badly written query that scans way more data than it needs to can be a real credit-guzzler. The longer a query runs, the more you pay. For your biggest tables, take the time to define a clustering key. This is like telling Snowflake how your data is organized, which helps it scan much less data to find what it needs, making queries faster and cheaper.

Don’t be a data hoarder

Be mindful of your data retention settings. Storing 90 days of history for a massive, constantly changing table using Time Travel can quietly add a lot to your storage bill. Not every table needs that long of a history. Adjust the retention period for each table based on what you actually need for business or compliance reasons.

This video provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the Snowflake pricing model, explaining how credits, storage, and serverless features contribute to your final bill.

Taking control of your Snowflake pricing

So, there you have it. Snowflake’s pricing isn’t as scary as it looks once you break it down. Its pay-for-what-you-use model is incredibly flexible, but it does mean you need to keep an eye on things to avoid unexpected costs. The whole game is about understanding the three main levers: compute credits, storage rates, and data transfer.

By using simple strategies like setting aggressive auto-suspend times, finding the right warehouse size for the job, and using resource monitors, you can get all the power of Snowflake without the fear of an out-of-control bill.

Turn your Snowflake costs into support assets with eesel AI

You’re putting in all this work to manage your Snowflake costs and get your data organized. But what if that data could do more than just sit there waiting to be queried?

This is where a tool like eesel AI can make a huge difference. While you’re focused on the cost of storing all that valuable company knowledge, eesel AI puts it to work. It connects directly to your knowledge sources, your helpdesk docs in Zendesk, your wikis in Confluence, and your guides in Google Docs, to create autonomous AI agents that resolve customer support tickets on their own. It learns from your existing documentation and past tickets to provide instant, accurate answers.

eesel AI connects with all your company's knowledge sources to power autonomous support agents.

This turns your data from a passive cost on your Snowflake bill into an active asset that boosts efficiency and makes customers happier. Instead of just paying to store information, you can finally unlock its true value and get a real return on it.