Snowflake runs on AWS 24 , Azure 6 or Google Cloud 1 . Compute is a virtual warehouse in T-shirt sizes, each size doubling the previous one's resources and its burn rate in credits: X-Small uses 1 credit per hour, Small 2, up to 6X-Large at 512. Warehouses bill per second with a 60-second minimum on each start, auto-suspend when idle and auto-resume on the next query. A multi-cluster warehouse (Enterprise edition and above) adds clusters of the same size when queries queue, which serves concurrency; a bigger size serves heavier single queries. Gen2 warehouses burn 1.35 credits per hour at X-Small on AWS in exchange for faster execution.
What a credit costs depends on edition and region. Snowflake's consumption table (effective 30 September 2026) lists on-demand credits in AWS US East at $2.00 (Standard), $3.00 (Enterprise), $4.00 (Business Critical) and $6.00 (Virtual Private Snowflake), and storage at $23 per compressed TB per month. The cloud services layer is free unless it exceeds 10% of the day's warehouse credits. Two settings keep a BI warehouse's bill bounded:
CREATE WAREHOUSE bi_wh WITH WAREHOUSE_SIZE = 'XSMALL'
AUTO_SUSPEND = 60 AUTO_RESUME = TRUE -- seconds idle before suspending
MIN_CLUSTER_COUNT = 1 MAX_CLUSTER_COUNT = 3 SCALING_POLICY = 'STANDARD';
CREATE RESOURCE MONITOR bi_daily WITH CREDIT_QUOTA = 10 FREQUENCY = DAILY
START_TIMESTAMP = IMMEDIATELY
TRIGGERS ON 90 PERCENT DO NOTIFY ON 100 PERCENT DO SUSPEND;
ALTER WAREHOUSE bi_wh SET RESOURCE_MONITOR = bi_daily;