Trial Accounts¶
A Snowflake trial account lets you evaluate/test Snowflake’s full range of innovative and powerful features with no cost or contractual obligations. To sign up for a trial account, all you need is a valid email address; no payment information or other qualifying information is required.
Signing Up for a Trial Account¶
You can sign up for a free trial using the self-service form (on the Snowflake website).
When you sign up for a trial account, you select your cloud platform, region, and Snowflake Edition. These selections can affect how quickly you exhaust your free usage balance. For example, some features available in the Enterprise Edition consume additional credits.
The balance of your free usage decreases as you consume credits to use compute resources and accrue costs associated with storage.
The trial continues for 30 days (from the sign-up date) or until you’ve depleted your free usage balance, whichever occurs first. At any time during the trial, you can cancel the trial or convert the account to a paid account.
At the end of the trial, the account is suspended. You can still log into a suspended account, but you cannot use any features, such as running a virtual warehouse, loading data, or performing queries.
To reactivate a suspended trial account, you must enter a credit card, which converts it to a paid account.
Using Compute Resources¶
Virtual warehouses provide the compute power to load data and perform queries. These warehouses consume credits, which reduces your free usage balance. To begin, simply start a warehouse; any credits consumed by the warehouse will be deducted from your balance. If your credit consumption fully depletes your free usage balance, you must add a credit card to the account to continue using Snowflake.
Free credits are only consumed by the virtual warehouses you create in your account, and only when they are running.
Tip
To prevent unintentional usage of your free credits:
Verify the size of your virtual warehouses before you start/resume them. The larger the warehouse, the more credits it consumes while running. In many situations, Small or Medium size warehouses are sufficient for evaluating Snowflake’s loading and querying capabilities.
Do not disable auto-suspend when creating a warehouse. Choosing a short auto-suspend time period (e.g. 5 minutes or less) can reduce credit consumption.
Using Storage¶
As you load data into your trial account, the cost of that storage is subtracted from your free usage balance based on the standard On-Demand cost of a TB in your cloud platform and region. In addition to the cost of storage, loading data also consumes credits as it uses the compute resources of a warehouse.
Converting to a Paid Account¶
You can add a credit card to a trial account at any time to convert it to a paid account.
Sign into Snowsight.
Select Admin » Billing & Terms.
Select Payment Methods.
Select + Credit Card.
Enter the required information and select Add Card.
When you enter a credit card, Snowflake verifies that the card is valid by charging $1 (USD). No other charges are billed at that time.
Note that you can also change the credit card for a trial account, at any time, using the same interface in which you added the card. Each time you enter a new credit card, the new card will be charged $1 (USD).
Note
Adding a credit card to a trial account converts it to a paid account without ending the trial period. During the remainder of the trial period, you can continue using your free credits and storage until the balance is exhausted, after which all additional credit consumption and storage costs will be charged.
Unused balances expire when the trial period ends, at which time costs (for consuming credits and storing data) are charged to the credit card on file at the end of each billing cycle (typically monthly).
For pricing details, see the pricing page (on the Snowflake website).
Canceling a Trial Account¶
You can cancel a trial account at any time by contacting Snowflake Support and requesting the account to be canceled.
Note
Currently, trial accounts cannot be canceled through the web interface. To cancel an account, you must contact Snowflake Support.