Snowflake pricing: $2 to $4 per credit, warehouse sizes and storage

Snowflake bills on consumption, and the on-demand list price of one credit in the main US regions is $2.00 on Standard Edition, $3.00 on Enterprise and $4.00 on Business Critical, as listed in Snowflake's pricing guide on November 7, 2026. Storage in the same regions costs $23 per TB per month on AWS US East and US West, Azure East US 2 and GCP US East 4, and $20 per TB on GCP US-Central1. Every bill is built from three parts: compute measured in credits, storage measured in compressed terabytes, and data transfer out of the region.

The credit price is only half of the calculation. The other half is how many credits a workload burns, which depends on warehouse size, how many hours each warehouse runs, and whether serverless features or cloud services add usage on top. An X-Small warehouse consumes 1 credit per hour and every size step doubles that rate, so a Large warehouse at 8 credits per hour costs $24 per running hour on Enterprise in a US region.

Snowflake documents the formula plainly: compute cost is the number of consumed credits multiplied by the price of a credit. The figures below come from Snowflake's pricing guide, the pricing options page and the cost and warehouse sections of the Snowflake documentation, all checked on November 7, 2026. Prices for pre-purchased capacity contracts are not published; Snowflake states that the capacity price is determined when the order is placed.

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SNOWFLAKE CREDIT PRICES BY EDITION AND REGION.

The edition sets the price of every credit the account consumes, and the region shifts it again. The pricing guide lists on-demand prices in USD per credit and storage in USD per TB per month. A selection of regions shows the spread.

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Region	Standard	Enterprise	Business Critical	Storage per TB/month
AWS US East (N. Virginia)	$2.00	$3.00	$4.00	$23
Azure East US 2 (Virginia)	$2.00	$3.00	$4.00	$23
GCP US-Central1 (Iowa)	$2.00	$3.00	$4.00	$20
AWS Canada (Central)	$2.25	$3.50	$4.50	$25
AWS EU (Ireland)	$2.60	$3.90	$5.20	$23
AWS EU (Frankfurt)	$2.60	$3.90	$5.20	$24.50
AWS EU (London)	$2.70	$4.00	$5.40	$24
AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	$2.85	$4.30	$5.70	$25
AWS South America (São Paulo)	$3.10	$4.65	$6.20	$40.50

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US government regions are listed for Business Critical only: AWS US Gov West 1 at $5.60 per credit with storage at $39 per TB, and Virtual Private Snowflake at $8.40 per credit in the same region. The pricing guide lists capacity storage prices for every region, and in the version checked they match the on-demand storage prices. Snowflake's pricing options page describes the two ways to buy the service as on-demand, paid month to month, or pre-paid capacity.

The edition also decides which features are available at all. According to Snowflake's editions documentation, each edition includes everything in the editions below it, and the jump from Standard to Enterprise is the one most analytics teams feel first.

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Feature	Minimum edition
Time Travel up to 1 day	Standard
Extended Time Travel up to 90 days	Enterprise
Multi-cluster warehouses	Enterprise
Materialized views and search optimization	Enterprise
Column masking and row access policies	Enterprise
Tri-Secret Secure customer-managed keys	Business Critical
AWS PrivateLink private connectivity	Business Critical
HIPAA PHI data and PCI DSS support	Business Critical
Failover and failback between accounts	Business Critical

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A team that needs row access policies to restrict what each region's sales managers see in a dashboard therefore needs Enterprise, and pays $3.00 rather than $2.00 for every credit in a US region, including credits spent on workloads that never touch those policies. Storing PHI also requires a signed business associate agreement with Snowflake before any data is loaded, in addition to Business Critical.

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SNOWFLAKE WAREHOUSE SIZES AND CREDITS PER HOUR.

Virtual warehouses are the compute clusters that run queries, loads and transformations. Snowflake's warehouse documentation lists the hourly credit rate for each size of a Gen1 standard warehouse, and the pricing guide adds the rates for Snowpark-optimized warehouses, which are designed for memory-heavy Python and machine learning work.

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Size	Standard warehouse credits/hour	Snowpark-optimized credits/hour
X-Small	1	N/A
Small	2	N/A
Medium	4	6
Large	8	12
X-Large	16	24
2X-Large	32	48
3X-Large	64	96
4X-Large	128	192
5X-Large	256	384
6X-Large	512	768

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Billing is per second with a 60-second minimum each time a warehouse starts or resumes. A warehouse that resumes for a 15-second query is billed for a full minute, and from then on billing follows the seconds it actually runs. Auto-suspend is on by default, so an idle warehouse stops consuming credits once its configured inactivity period passes. Gen2 standard warehouses use different credit rates that Snowflake publishes in its Service Consumption Table; the warehouse documentation notes that Gen2 is not yet available on every cloud provider or in every region and is not the default for new standard warehouses.

Multi-cluster warehouses, an Enterprise feature, add identical clusters when concurrency rises. Snowflake's documentation gives a worked case: a Medium warehouse with three clusters in Auto-scale mode, where the first cluster runs for two hours, the second for one hour and the third for 30 minutes, consumes 8, 4 and 2 credits respectively, or 14 credits in total. Each extra cluster bills at the full rate of its size while it runs.

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CLOUD SERVICES, SERVERLESS FEATURES AND DATA TRANSFER IN SNOWFLAKE BILLS.

Beyond warehouses, two other kinds of compute consume credits. Cloud services cover the coordination layer that handles authentication, metadata and query compilation, and Snowflake charges for them only when daily cloud services usage exceeds 10% of that day's warehouse usage. The adjustment is calculated each day in UTC. On a day when warehouses consume 100 credits and cloud services consume 12, the 10-credit allowance is subtracted and 2 cloud services credits are billed.

Serverless features such as Snowpipe and search optimization run on Snowflake-managed compute instead of customer warehouses. They appear as separate line items, are billed per second rounded up to the next whole second, and do not count toward the 10% cloud services adjustment. Snowflake also documents the pricing of its AI functions on a dedicated page, separate from warehouse credits, and teams that use per-user AI tools can cap that spend with budgets, as covered in the article on Snowflake CoWork Deep Research and per-user budgets.

Storage is billed at a flat rate per TB per month, calculated on the average amount stored after compression. The storage documentation lists what counts: files in stages for loading or unloading, table data including history retained for Time Travel, Fail-safe data, and clones once they reference data deleted from the source table. Time Travel and Fail-safe charges are calculated for each 24-hour period, so a 90-day retention setting on a frequently updated table can add storage that a 1-day setting would not.

Data transfer into Snowflake is free. Egress depends on where the data goes: the pricing guide lists $0.00 per TB within the same region on AWS, Azure and GCP, ranges from $20.00 to $140.00 per TB for transfers to another AWS region, and higher rates for transfers to another cloud provider or the internet. Sharing data across regions or clouds, a scenario discussed in the piece on Snowflake Open Data Sharing for Iceberg tables, is where these charges appear most often.

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SNOWFLAKE COST EXAMPLE FOR A SMALL ANALYTICS TEAM.

The following example is illustrative and uses on-demand list prices for AWS US East (N. Virginia). An analytics team runs two warehouses: a Small warehouse for BI dashboards that stays active 8 hours on each of 22 business days, and a Medium warehouse for nightly transformations that runs 1 hour on each of 30 days. The account stores an average of 3 TB of compressed data, and cloud services stay below the 10% threshold. On Enterprise and Business Critical, the team also lets the BI warehouse add a second Small cluster for 2 peak hours on each business day, which Standard Edition does not allow.

BI warehouse:     Small, 2 credits/h x 8 h x 22 days   = 352 credits
ELT warehouse:    Medium, 4 credits/h x 1 h x 30 days  = 120 credits
Peak cluster:     Small, 2 credits/h x 2 h x 22 days   =  88 credits (Enterprise and above)
Storage:          3 TB x $23 per TB                    = $69 per month

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Edition	Credits per month	Compute cost	Storage	Monthly total	Annual total
Standard (no multi-cluster)	472	$944.00	$69.00	$1,013.00	$12,156.00
Enterprise	560	$1,680.00	$69.00	$1,749.00	$20,988.00
Business Critical	560	$2,240.00	$69.00	$2,309.00	$27,708.00

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The same Enterprise workload in AWS EU (Frankfurt), at $3.90 per credit and $24.50 per TB, comes to $2,257.50 per month, or $27,090.00 a year, with the same credits and the same data. Moving from Standard to Enterprise raises the bill by 73% in this case, because the 88 peak-hour credits are added and every credit costs 50% more.

Small habits change the numbers too. If a team's X-Small warehouse resumes 300 times in a month for queries that each finish in 15 seconds, the 60-second minimum bills 5 credits instead of the 1.25 credits of actual running time: $15.00 instead of $3.75 at the Enterprise rate. Grouping dashboard refreshes so the warehouse resumes less often reduces this overhead. A BI team comparing these figures with Microsoft's per-user model can find the equivalent breakdown in the reference on Power BI Pro, Premium Per User and Fabric F64 capacity costs.

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COMMON SNOWFLAKE PRICING MISTAKES THE DOCUMENTATION CORRECTS.

The warehouse size is often treated as a fixed monthly fee. Snowflake charges for warehouse running time only, per second after the first minute, so a Large warehouse that is suspended most of the day can cost less than a Small one that never suspends.

Cloud services are sometimes assumed to be free. They are free only up to 10% of daily warehouse usage, and workloads with many small metadata-heavy queries can exceed that allowance. Serverless features are also billed separately and never benefit from the adjustment.

Storage is frequently estimated on raw data size. Snowflake bills compressed size for tables, but staged files count at their file size whether compressed or not, and Time Travel, Fail-safe and clones that reference deleted data add to the monthly average.

The edition is sometimes chosen for one feature without accounting for the price of every other credit. Row access policies, masking policies and multi-cluster warehouses all require Enterprise, and once the account is on Enterprise, every warehouse, serverless and cloud services credit is billed at the Enterprise rate.

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SNOWFLAKE PRICING: WHAT TO CHECK BEFORE SIGNING OR RENEWING.

The published facts are firm for on-demand accounts: credit prices by edition and region, storage per TB per month, warehouse rates from 1 credit per hour on X-Small to 512 on 6X-Large for Gen1 standard warehouses, per-second billing with a 60-second minimum, and the 10% cloud services allowance. Snowflake confirms these on its pricing guide and in its cost documentation.

Several numbers depend on the account. Pre-purchased capacity prices are set in the order and are not published, Gen2 warehouse rates and serverless feature rates sit in the Service Consumption Table, and egress costs vary by destination region and cloud. AI function pricing is documented separately from warehouse credits.

Before a contract or renewal, an analytics lead should confirm the region and cloud of the account, the edition each security or concurrency requirement forces, the expected running hours of each warehouse rather than its size alone, and the average compressed storage including Time Travel retention. With those four inputs and the published rates, the monthly bill can be estimated with the same method as the example above.

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