How to Avoid Overspending on Snowflake?

Not so long ago, only the biggest companies could afford to build data warehouses. Snowflake’s cloud data warehousing solution emerged as a viable alternative to traditional data warehouses, which often required companies to make large Capital expenditures (CapEx) investments. Today, the platform has become a leading solution due to its pricing model, which charges customers only for what they use.

But what if there was a way you could reduce your costs while keeping your current data stack and team the same? Aggua, an easy-to-use data discovery tool, can help you save on Snowflake.

There are also many businesses that struggle to comprehend the nuances of Snowflake pricing and wind up overspending as a result. Aggua gives you accurate calculations of your usage as well as insights that will help you save on costs without disrupting your current workflow.

Understanding Snowflake Costs

Snowflake offers an easy-to-use, flexible pricing model, which means you can scale up as your business grows, with minimal latency and advanced analytics. Plus, Snowflake has minimal hardware and software requirements so you don't have to worry about configuring or maintaining anything.

Snowflake’s pricing is determined by your organization's usage whether it is for storage, data transfer, or computation. What makes it even more of a standout is that you don't pay with cash but with Snowflake credits.

Compute Costs

A virtual warehouse lets you complete tasks by providing access to the tools it needs to get done, including processing power, memory, and temporary storage.

These warehouses are available in 10 sizes, from x-small to 6x-large, with the price and power requirements doubling with each step up. Essentially, the amount of time your warehouse is online or continuously running, the size of the warehouse you choose, and how many, will help determine your Snowflake costs.

Note that performing a query, automatically creates a warehouse and it doesn’t shut down until you designate an auto-suspend period.

Storage Costs

Surprisingly, compared to other virtual warehouses, Snowflake's storage fees are quite affordable. The cost of storage is determined by the amount of data your company stores on a daily average (in bytes) in its system. Snowflake automatically reduces and optimizes all table data through compression. Using this compressed file size as a base, it determines how much storage an account needs.

Cloud Services Costs

Snowflake's cloud services offer many tools. This includes metadata and infrastructure management, Application Programming Interface (API), SQL, access control and authentication mechanisms, and query parsing.

Since Snowflake's cloud services rely on compute resources, using them requires Snowflake credits. Only cloud services that use more than 10% of your daily computing resources are billed. The daily 10% adjustment is applied automatically depending on that day's credit price.

Other Fees

You might also incur other charges, depending on how you use Snowflake. For instance, Snowflake charges a per-byte price for data transfers, regardless of whether you're sending data to other cloud data platforms or across Snowflake regions.

Snowflake also charges for the use of its file-loading service, Snowpipe. Since Snowflake controls the warehouses, users are charged for actual compute utilization, not for active but unused warehouses.

What are Snowflake Credits?

Snowflake credits are the currency used to measure the amount of computing power your organization utilizes within the Snowflake platform. It's important to note that it only kicks in when relevant resources are actually being used or active, such as when a serverless application or a virtual warehouse is being accessed.

Credits are spent in various ways by each Snowflake service. Furthermore, the credit price rate is determined by the Snowflake plan that you select.

How Does Aggua Help Control Snowflake Costs?

Snowflake’s resource monitor helps track your usage of cloud services and virtual warehouses. This will make it easier for you to keep your credit usage within reasonable bounds. It also provides the option to shut down a warehouse once it hits its credit limit.

The resource monitor allows you to establish criteria for when certain actions should take place. For instance, you can set duration or specify data limitations and once it's been realized, an action is triggered. These actions include issuing alerts or halting user-managed warehouses.

However, if you need to track more than Snowflake costs, or you require a more comprehensive solution, you might find yourself looking for an alternative. That’s where Aggua comes in.

Aggua data cost management solutions provides all the metadata necessary to compute how much storage a table has. We know how many bytes a table will hold, therefore we can provide you with an accurate computation of how much Snowflake will cost per day, month, or year.

Aggua provides you with the information and insights necessary to truly optimize your costs.