Introduction:

Snowflake pricing is determined by how much you use compute resources such as warehouses (virtual compute instances) and storage, as well as other costs like cloud services, cloud storage, and data transfer. Most of your Snowflake costs will be for computing resources, which typically account for 90% or more of your monthly costs. With Snowflake, you don't have to make any upfront commitments or sign any long-term contracts.

You can start with a free trial account, and you won't be charged if you don't use any billable services. You only pay for what you use. Snowflake pricing may vary depending on the platform and region you're using.

Which tools can help optimize your Snowflake costs?

There are a multitude of tools that you can leverage to confidently optimize and minimize your Snowflake costs. One such tool is Snoptimizer, which can be a game-changer for your organization.

Snoptimizer is the first automated Snowflake Cost Optimization Service that ensures significant cost savings (up to 50% on Snowflake compute) without sacrificing performance.

We built Snoptimizer because we saw a significant need in the marketplace. We were often called in by Snowflake customers for Snowflake Health checks, and 98% of the time, their accounts were not fully optimized.

Snoptimizer runs regularly and scours your Snowflake Operations Account Meta Data (over 40 views) continuously looking for Snowflake storage and computing anti-patterns and inefficiencies related to cost.

Usage-Based Pricing:

Usage Based Pricing in cloud services, especially in Snowflake, can be incredibly awesome sometimes. The fact that we can even start an account off with 400 credits for 30 days for a Proof of Concept (POC) is just amazing to me. Before this, our consulting company hesitated to introduce these more expensive solutions to our consulting clients which were small or medium size businesses because these solutions were out of their pricing comfort zone (especially when working with analytical databases that could scale like Exadata, Teradata, and Netezza).

What is the pricing on Snowflake?

For those of you who are new to Snowflake, let's start with Snowflake consumption pricing basics. Snowflake overall is usage or consumption-based pricing.  This means you only pay for what you use. Technically, you could set up a free Snowflake Trial Account and never pay anything because you never used any of the services that have a cost. T

For most Snowflake Accounts, Snowflake Compute or the Snowflake Warehouses (which are virtual compute engines) is where 90% or more of your costs are. The other four cost areas of Storage Costs, Cloud Computing Costs, Cloud Services Costs, and Data Transfer costs are typically easily 10% or less of the Snowflake SaaS costs per month.  Often the others can even be 1% or less unless you have certain use cases or end up mistakenly using Snowflake Cost Anti-patterns.

Please keep in mind that as soon as your Snowflake Account is provisioned, you the administrator, or a person with their credit card associated with the account have extreme cost risk by default.  Our best practice is to always enable Snowflake Cost Optimization with Snoptimizer immediately after provisioning a Snowflake Account. If you decide against that then at the very least you should limit access or set up standard Snowflake Cost Minimization Guardrails and Snowflake Cost Optimization and Cost Minimization Best Practices.

For those of you who are more Snowflake savvy and already know the basics then let's cover more advanced Snowflake pricing details.

Snowflake Compute Pricing - Advanced

One of the first things that Snoptimizer does is automate daily Resource Monitors at a warehouse level based on all the Snowflake Metadata Database history and warehouse and Resource Monitor settings. This gets set almost immediately after you purchase Snoptimizer. This has both huge cost risk reduction limits and guardrails for all of your warehouse compute.

One cool thing you can do is reduce your default query time out to 4 hours or less instead of 2 days by default with the following code.

ALTER WAREHOUSE SET STATEMENT_TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS = 14400;

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How to Optimize Your Costs?

Over the last 3 years, my teams and I have analyzed over 100 Snowflake accounts, and about 95% of them were not fully optimized for both Cloud data costs and Cloud cost risk minimization. This is why my team and I are so excited to have created Snoptimizer (the first automated Snowflake Cost Optimization Service) - Easily optimize your Snowflake Data Cloud Account here in a few hours.

I think the reason why 90% of those accounts didn't have resource monitors or regular optimizations in place was initially Snowflake is incredibly cost-effective and typically had massive savings, especially from on-prem migrations that we have done.  However, companies that do not optimize their Data Cloud Costs are missing out big time!

Try Snoptimizer today:

Snoptimizer quickly and automatically optimizes your Snowflake account for security, cost, and performance. It eliminates headaches and concerns about security risks and cost overruns across your Snowflake account.

Try Snoptimizer today. Sign up and schedule a personal demo with us!

Optimization in a few hours, hassle-free!

Conclusion:

I hope the Snowflake Basic and Advanced Pricing information above is useful to you on your Snowflake Journey. For me, finding out that Snowflake consumption-based pricing was so reasonable was game-changing for both myself and my consulting company. Before Snowflake, we couldn't provide compute scale with enough speed to many of the largest big analytical challenges and solutions our clients needed.

I remember building predictive marketing tools and we often had to crunch large data sets we would often run into scaling challenges and have to spend tons of time and engineering effort to engineer for scale. Keep in mind that if you don't use Snowflake's Services smartly, you can end up spending a lot of money. Therefore, we recommend using Snoptimizer to help you reduce your costs.

If you're looking to optimize your Snowflake account costs, try Snoptimizer today!

Sign up and schedule a personal demo with us!