Snowpipe costs¶

Resource consumption and management overhead¶

With the credit-per-GB pricing model, Snowpipe billing is calculated based on a fixed credit amount per GB of data that you loaded. This simplified approach means that you don’t need to track or manage compute utilization, which was formerly measured with per-second/per-core granularity.

File sizes and staging frequency might impact the performance of Snowpipe. For recommended best practices, see Continuous data loads — that is, Snowpipe — and file sizing.

Estimating Snowpipe charges¶

Estimating Snowpipe charges is straightforward. You can calculate your expected costs by using your anticipated data volume and the fixed credit amount per GB. Because text files — such as CSV, JSON, XML — are charged based on their uncompressed size, you must know the compression ratio of your text files.

You can verify these calculations against your actual usage by examining the BILLED_BYTES column in the relevant Account Usage views. The BILLED_BYTES column was introduced in the 2025_05 BCR bundle.

To understand the actual credit consumption for your specific workloads, we suggest that you experiment by performing a typical set of loads.

Viewing data-load history and cost¶

Account administrators (users with the ACCOUNTADMIN role) or users with a role granted the MONITOR USAGE global privilege can use Snowsight or SQL to view the credits billed to your Snowflake account within a specified date range.

Occasionally, the data compaction and maintenance process can consume Snowflake credits. For example, the returned results might show that you consumed credits with 0 BYTES_INSERTED and 0 FILES_INSERTED. This means that your data is not being loaded, but the data compaction and maintenance process has consumed some credits.

To view the credits billed for Snowpipe data loading for your account:

Snowsight:

In the navigation menu, select Admin » Cost management.

SQL:

Query either of the following:

• PIPE_USAGE_HISTORY table function (in the Snowflake Information Schema).

• PIPE_USAGE_HISTORY view (in Account Usage).

  You can run the following queries against the PIPE_USAGE_HISTORY view. You can verify costs based on volume by using the BYTES_BILLED column.

  Query: Snowpipe cost history (by day, by object)

  The following query provides a full list of pipes and the volume of credits that you consumed through the service over the last 30 days, broken out by day.

  SELECT TO_DATE(start_time) AS date,
    pipe_name,
    SUM(credits_used) AS credits_used,
    SUM(bytes_billed) AS bytes_billed_total
  FROM snowflake.account_usage.pipe_usage_history
  WHERE start_time >= DATEADD(month,-1,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
  GROUP BY 1,2
  ORDER BY bytes_billed_total DESC;
  

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  Query: Snowpipe History & m-day average

  The following query shows the average daily credits consumed by Snowpipe that are grouped by week over the last year. This query can help you identify anomalies in daily consumption averages over the year so that you can investigate sudden increases or unexpected changes in consumption.

  WITH credits_by_day AS (
    SELECT TO_DATE(start_time) AS date,
      SUM(credits_used) AS credits_used,
      SUM(bytes_billed) AS bytes_billed_total
    FROM snowflake.account_usage.pipe_usage_history
    WHERE start_time >= DATEADD(year,-1,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
    GROUP BY 1
  )
  SELECT DATE_TRUNC('week',date),
    AVG(credits_used) AS avg_daily_credits,
    AVG(bytes_billed_total) AS avg_daily_bytes_billed
  FROM credits_by_day
  GROUP BY 1
  ORDER BY 1;
  

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