What is the Snowflake Credit Cost Calculator?
Snowflake bills compute usage in credits. A virtual warehouse consumes credits per hour based on its size, and each credit costs a dollar amount that depends on your Snowflake edition and cloud region. This calculator estimates how much a warehouse run will cost so you can budget queries, dashboards, and ETL jobs before they hit your bill.
How to use it
Pick your warehouse size from the dropdown — each size has a fixed credit-per-hour rate, doubling at each tier (X-Small = 1, Small = 2, Medium = 4, and so on up to 4X-Large = 128). Enter how many hours the warehouse runs and your effective price per credit. The calculator returns the run cost plus projected 24-hour and 30-day costs if the warehouse never auto-suspends.
The formula explained
The math is simple: $$\text{Cost} = \text{Credits per hour} \times \text{Hours run} \times \text{Credit price}$$ Snowflake meters credits per second (with a 60-second minimum per resume), so partial hours are billed proportionally — entering 0.5 hours bills half an hour of credits. Auto-suspend is the single biggest lever for cutting cost, because an idle running warehouse still burns credits.
Worked example
A Medium warehouse runs 4 credits/hour. If it runs 5 hours at a credit price of $3.00: credits used = \(4 \times 5 = 20\), and cost = \(20 \times \$3.00\) = $60.00. Left running 24/7 for a month it would cost $$4 \times 24 \times 30 \times \$3 = \$8{,}640$$ — which is why auto-suspend matters.
FAQ
What is a credit worth? It varies by edition and region — Standard is often around $2–$3 per credit, Enterprise higher. Use your contracted rate for accuracy.
Does size really double the cost? Yes. Each warehouse tier uses twice the credits per hour of the one below it, but typically finishes work faster, so total cost can stay similar for parallelizable workloads.
Are storage and cloud services included? No. This tool covers virtual warehouse compute only; storage and serverless/cloud-services charges are billed separately.
