Snowflake Pricing 2026
Complete pricing guide with plans, hidden costs, and negotiation tips
Snowflake pricing varies by team size and features, ranging from $0 to $50K per month in 2026. Your actual cost depends on the tier you choose, contract length, and negotiated discounts.
Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.
- Free tier: No free tier available
- Billing: Monthly and annual (save 15-20%)
- Hidden costs: Add ~35% for implementation, support, and training
Snowflake offers 4 pricing tiers: Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS). The Enterprise plan is mid-size to large organizations with production analytics workloads.
Compared to other data warehousing software, Snowflake is positioned at the premium price point.
Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehousing platform that operates on a fully consumption-based pricing model. Unlike traditional data warehouses, Snowflake separates compute and storage, allowing organizations to scale each independently. The platform runs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and charges through a credit-based system where costs depend on your chosen edition (Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, or VPS), cloud provider, and region.
Snowflake's pricing centers around credits that cost between $2 and $4 on-demand, with discounts of 15-40% available through annual capacity commitments. Storage is billed separately at approximately $23 per compressed TB per month. For a typical mid-size analytics workload, expect to spend $2,000-$5,000 per month, though costs can scale significantly for enterprise deployments with heavy concurrency and large data volumes.
All Snowflake Plans & Pricing
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | Contact | Contact | Small teams and startups getting started with cloud data warehousing |
| Enterprise | Contact | Contact | Mid-size to large organizations with production analytics workloads |
| Business Critical | Contact | Contact | Healthcare, financial services, and highly regulated industries |
| Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) | Contact | Contact | Government, defense, and organizations requiring maximum data isolation |
View all features by plan
Standard
- Core data warehousing and analytics
- ~$2 per credit on-demand
- 1-day Time Travel for data recovery
- Automatic encryption at rest and in transit
- Per-second billing with 60-second minimum
- Runs on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
- Columnar storage with automatic compression
- Multi-cluster shared data architecture
Enterprise
- All Standard features included
- ~$3 per credit on-demand (25% more than Standard)
- Up to 90-day Time Travel
- Multi-cluster virtual warehouses for concurrency
- Materialized views for query acceleration
- Column-level and row-level security
- Dynamic data masking
- Object tagging and data governance
- Periodic rekeying of encrypted data
Business Critical
- All Enterprise features included
- ~$4 per credit on-demand (50% more than Standard)
- HIPAA and HITRUST CSF compliance
- Customer-managed encryption keys (Tri-Secret Secure)
- Account failover and failback for disaster recovery
- Private connectivity via AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link
- Enhanced security for PHI and sensitive data
- Database failover and replication across regions
Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS)
- All Business Critical features included
- Fully isolated Snowflake environment
- Dedicated metadata store and compute resources
- Maximum data privacy and compliance
- Separate from all other Snowflake accounts
- Custom deployment for highest security needs
- Dedicated virtual servers for compute
- Contact sales for custom pricing
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Frequently Asked Questions
01 How much does Snowflake cost?
Snowflake uses consumption-based pricing where you pay per credit used. On-demand credit costs range from approximately $2 for Standard edition to $4 for Business Critical edition. Pre-purchased annual capacity contracts offer 15-40% discounts, lowering credits to $1.50-$2.50 each.
02 How much does a Snowflake credit cost?
A Snowflake credit costs $2 to $4 on-demand depending on your edition (Standard, Enterprise, or Business Critical) and cloud provider region. With annual capacity commitments, credits drop to $1.50-$2.50 each. An X-Small warehouse consumes 1 credit per hour, while larger warehouses consume up to 128 credits per hour.
03 Does Snowflake have a free tier?
Snowflake offers a free trial with $400 in credits for new accounts, but does not have a permanent free tier. Once your trial credits are exhausted, you must purchase a plan. The minimum capacity contract is $25,000 annually, though on-demand pay-as-you-go is available with no minimum commitment.
04 How does Snowflake billing work?
Snowflake bills separately for compute (credits), storage (per TB/month), and data transfer (per GB egressed). Compute is billed per-second with a 60-second minimum each time a warehouse starts. Storage costs approximately $23/TB/month on-demand. You can choose between on-demand pricing or pre-purchased capacity contracts for lower rates.
05 What is cheaper, Snowflake Standard or Enterprise?
Snowflake Standard is approximately 25% cheaper per credit than Enterprise edition. Standard costs about $2/credit on-demand versus $3/credit for Enterprise. However, Enterprise includes 90-day Time Travel, multi-cluster warehouses, and governance features that can reduce costs for larger workloads through better concurrency management.
06 How can I reduce my Snowflake costs?
Key strategies include: using auto-suspend to shut down idle warehouses, right-sizing warehouse sizes for each workload, leveraging caching to avoid redundant queries, using pre-purchased capacity contracts for 15-40% discounts, and monitoring credit consumption with Snowflake's built-in usage tracking. Switching from on-demand to annual contracts can save thousands per month.