Snowpipe costs¶

Resource consumption and management overhead¶

With the previous pricing model, Snowflake tracks the resource consumption of loads for all pipes in an account, with per-second/per-core granularity, as Snowpipe actively queues and processes data files. Per-core refers to the physical CPU cores in a compute server. The utilization recorded is then translated into familiar Snowflake credits, which are listed on the bill for your account.

Decisions with regard to data file size and staging frequency impact the cost and performance of Snowpipe. For recommended best practices, see Continuous data loads (i.e. Snowpipe) and file sizing.

In addition to resource consumption, an overhead is included in the utilization costs charged for Snowpipe. This overhead is charged, regardless of whether the event notifications or REST API calls resulted in data being loaded. This overhead charge appears as a Snowpipe charge in your billing statement.

Estimating Snowpipe charges¶

With the new fixed-credit amount per GB for Snowpipe, estimating Snowpipe charges is straightforward. You can simply calculate your expected costs by using your anticipated data volume. Because text files — such as CSV, JSON, XML — are charged based on their uncompressed size, you need to know the compression ratio of your text files. You can then verify these calculations against the actual usage by examining the BILLED_BYTES column in the relevant Account Usage views. The BILLED_BYTES column will be introduced in the upcoming 2025_05 BCR bundle.

To understand the actual credit consumption under the new model 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, the Classic Console, 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:

Select Admin » Cost Management.

Classic Console:

Select Account » Billing & Usage.

Snowpipe utilization is shown as a special Snowflake-provided warehouse named SNOWPIPE.

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 now also use the queries to verify costs based on volume by using the BYTES_BILLED column.

  Note

  You must enable the upcoming 2025_05 BCR bundle to access 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 consumed through the service over the last 30 days, broken out by day. Any irregularities in the credit consumption or the presence of consistently high consumption are indications of potential problems that you should investigate.

  SELECT TO_DATE(start_time) AS date,
    pipe_name,
    SUM(credits_used) AS credits_used,
    SUM(bytes_billed) AS bytes_billed_total -- Added for new pricing verification
  FROM snowflake.account_usage.pipe_usage_history
  WHERE start_time >= DATEADD(month,-1,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
  GROUP BY 1,2
  ORDER BY 3 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 -- Added for new pricing verification
    FROM snowflake.account_usage.pipe_usage_history
    WHERE start_time >= DATEADD(year,-1,CURRENT_TIMESTAMP())
    GROUP BY 1
    ORDER BY 2 DESC)
  SELECT DATE_TRUNC('week',date),
    AVG(credits_used) AS avg_daily_credits,
    AVG(bytes_billed_total) AS avg_daily_bytes_billed -- Added for new pricing verification
  FROM credits_by_day
  GROUP BY 1
  ORDER BY 1;
  

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