Snowflake Editions comparison | Snowflake Pricing explained

Understanding Snowflake Editions and Pricing Model

Overview of Snowflake Editions

• Snowflake offers four editions: Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, and Virtual Private Snowflake, each with increasing features tailored to organizational needs.

• The Standard Edition provides core functionalities like SQL data warehousing, one-day time travel, fail-safe security features (Federated authentication, MFA, SSO), secure data sharing, and access to the data marketplace.

Features of Higher Editions

• The Enterprise Edition includes all Standard features plus multicluster warehouses, up to 90 days of time travel, materialized views, and enhanced performance features such as search optimization.

• The Business Critical Edition is designed for regulated industries with sensitive data. It adds compliance support for PHI data under HIPAA regulations and PCI DSS standards along with failover capabilities for disaster recovery.

• The Virtual Private Snowflake offers maximum security in a completely isolated environment from other accounts. It includes dedicated resources but restricts certain features by default.

Understanding the Pricing Model

• Snowflake's pricing model consists of two main categories: data storage and compute usage. Storage costs are based on average monthly usage calculated per terabyte.

• Customers are charged a flat rate per terabyte that considers data compression; thus if 10 TB compresses to 5 TB in storage, they only pay for the compressed amount.

Purchasing Options

• There are two purchasing options: On-Demand (default upon sign-up allowing flexibility without long-term commitments) and Committed Capacity, which offers bulk discounts and additional service options but requires upfront payment.

Cost Structure Insights

• On-demand pricing is likened to paying for electricity—customers pay only for what they use—while committed capacity resembles a subscription model where customers pay upfront regardless of actual usage.

• Compute costs are charged using credits consumed during resource utilization (e.g., loading data or running queries). Costs vary based on cloud platform region and edition type selected.

Snowflake Billing and Compute Resources

Understanding Snowflake Edition Costs

• The cost for running a virtual warehouse in Snowflake is $8 per hour, with variations based on the edition, cloud platform, and region.

• Users can negotiate discounts on credit prices if they enter into a committed capacity agreement with Snowflake.

Credit Usage for Virtual Warehouses

• When starting a virtual warehouse, users are charged a minimum of 1 minute's worth of credits, regardless of whether it runs for less than that time.

• After the initial minute, credit usage is calculated on a per-second basis.

Serverless Compute Resources

• Apart from virtual warehouses, other compute resources also incur charges based on credits; these include serverless compute features managed by Snowflake.

• Examples of features utilizing serverless compute include Snowpipe, database replication, materialized views, automatic clustering, and search optimization.

Cloud Services Layer Charges

• The cloud services layer in Snowflake manages various activities such as user authentication and query optimization.

• Charges for cloud services apply only if daily consumption exceeds 10% of the daily usage of virtual warehouses.

Data Transfer Fees

• Customers moving or copying data between regions or clouds will incur data transfer charges at a flat rate per terabyte.

• Ingress (data entering Snowflake) is free; egress (data leaving Snowflake) incurs no fees if within the same cloud provider and region but does incur charges when transferring to different regions or providers.