Understanding costs for dbt Projects on Snowflake¶

This topic provides an overview of the costs associated with dbt Projects on Snowflake. For general information about Snowflake costs, see Understanding overall cost.

Compute costs¶

Running EXECUTE DBT PROJECT uses a virtual warehouse and consumes standard compute credits, the same as any warehouse workload. The warehouse set in your profiles.yml runs the dbt models and is billed at the standard credit rate for the time it’s active during the execution. If you are using a different warehouse to run the CREATE DBT PROJECT or EXECUTE DBT PROJECT command itself, that warehouse is also billed for the duration of the command. Snowflake recommends using the same warehouse for both to keep cost tracking simple.

No additional licensing fees and no per-user costs apply to dbt Projects on Snowflake.

To control compute costs, consider:

• Choosing an appropriate warehouse size for your dbt workload. Smaller warehouses cost fewer credits per hour, and dbt builds are often not bottlenecked on warehouse size.
• Using auto-suspend on the warehouse so it shuts down immediately after the execution completes.
• Running executions on a schedule rather than continuously.

For more information about exploring and controlling compute costs, see Exploring compute cost.