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.

Depending on how you run your project, more than one warehouse can be billed for a single run:

• The warehouse of the outer session that issues the CREATE DBT PROJECT or EXECUTE DBT PROJECT command, such as a Snowflake task, the Snowflake CLI, or an interactive worksheet.
• The warehouse set in your profiles.yml that runs the dbt models.

Each of these warehouses is billed for the duration it’s active. To keep costs consolidated and cost tracking simple, try to ensure that the outer session’s warehouse and the profiles.yml warehouse for production runs are the same. For more information, see Align your warehouse configuration.

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.