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Things you need to know about Snowflake pricing & its hidden costs

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Akanksha Sri
Things you need to know about Snowflake pricing & its hidden costs

For those who haven’t heard about Snowflake (and there can’t be many),  this “unicorn” is the creation of Snowflake Inc and has introduced this incredible enterprise-ready cloud data warehouse. Advanced data platforms back its data cloud and it provides services as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Snowflake is widely used for data processing, storage, and analysis purposes as it is faster, flexible, and easy to use than traditional approaches.

 

Why Snowflake is widely popular among the leading industries is because of its various features. Snowflake allows you to fetch data from any data source to Snowflake without writing a single line of code through Hevo Data. But this can trouble many customers to understand the concept of Snowflake pricing. This article will guide you to understand the Snowflake pricing concept in an easy way. 

 

Snowflake pricing depends upon various factors that involve usage related cost accruals at storage as well as computational resource level. Snowflake also offers different pricing schemes that can suit your business needs and budget.

 

Snowflake Pricing- Usage

Snowflake follows a popular pricing strategy as that of Amazon Redshift. The organization offers maximum flexibility to the users to provide different services. Thus, the pricing depends upon the three significant factors utilized by the consumer:

 

Snowflake Pricing- Usage

Snowflake follows the increasingly popular “usage-based” pricing strategy as do other vendors such as Amazon Redshift. The organization offers maximum flexibility to the users to provide different services. Thus, the pricing depends upon the three significant factors utilized by the consumer:

 

 

  • Cloud Data Warehouse
    The Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse is a set of servers that execute various functionalities like query execution and data loading. Snowflake offers a set of computing clusters depending upon the size of data and the number of users within operations.

    Unlike on-premises data warehouses, which are difficult to scale due to the provisioning of hardware, the Snowflake pricing model delivers elasticity of scale and service that adapts to your requirements.

 


Snowflake tracks the usage activities for these servers, and customers purchase Snowflake credits. The cluster size is directly related to usage credits. Even you can suspend a warehouse when it is not in operation.

 

  • Data Storage
    Snowflake stores all the data as internal stages. Snowflake follows the ETL process as data from an external source is uploaded in the Snowflake first, and then it is stored as a stage, later it is copied into the Snowflake table with the help of the bulk data loading process.

    Snowflake has an auto-compress feature that compresses all table data to minimize the physical space. Some data in Snowflake is also stored for historic-fail safe purposes.

  • Cloud services
    There are certain administrative services that ensure the smooth handling of snowflake tasks:

 

 

  • Authentication
  • Infrastructure management
  • Metadata management
  • Query parsing and optimization
  • Access control
  • Snowflake pricing purchase plans

 

So far, we have explained Snowflake pricing in relation to different Snowflake services, and there a number of plans that are available:

 

Pre-purchase capacity - In this type of pricing, the user can pre-purchase some amount or capacity of Snowflake resources. This is generally an economical option as users can get lower rates at the time of pre-purchase.

 

On-demand - This is similar to pay-as-you-go pricing. The pricing is incurred as per your usage. A usage bill is generated at the end of the month with usage details. The general rate for data storage is $40 per TB and a minimum of $25 for every month.

For new customers, it is recommended to purchase on-demand pricing, and then you can move to on-demand plans.

 

Hope this article gives you some good insight and helps you find the best Snowflake pricing plan!

 

 

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