Snowflake Storage Cost: Key Factors and Savings Tips in 2024

How much does it actually cost to store data on Snowflake? It’s a more complicated question than you might think. 

And yet, it’s a critical point, because Snowflake – and similar platforms – are what enable today’s leaders and tomorrow’s challengers to actually derive value from the data they have access to. 

We’ll unpack Snowflake storage cost, including how to get the most out of your Snowflake instance at the best price point possible. 

What is Snowflake Storage?

Snowflake storage is a cloud-based system from Snowflake that allows organizations to store their data in one place, enabling un-siloed access to structured and semi-structured data. 

The platform allows the business to access, query, and analyze large amounts of data.

Snowflake storage offers a number of benefits, including compressing and encrypting stored data, allowing for high availability and scalability, enabling relatively seamless querying of large sets of data, and integrations with large cloud providers.

What’s the big drawback? Snowflake storage costs can be expensive, especially as the amount of data stored by organizations today continues to grow rapidly 

How Snowflake Storage Costs are Calculated

Snowflake sets a monthly fee for data stored in the platform. This fee is based on the average amount of storage used per month (after compression), for data ingested into Snowflake. 

The price per TB stored differs slightly according to cloud provider and region, but for example an organization using AWS in the US East (Northern Virginia) will pay $23 per TB. Though this ranges to the $40 per TB mark. 

How is the average per month calculated? According to Snowflake, “Storage pricing is based on the average terabytes per month of all Customer Data stored in your Snowflake Account. The average terabytes per month is calculated by taking periodic snapshots of all Customer Data. The daily average will be displayed in the Snowflake Service. The monthly charge is based on the average calculated across the number of calendar days in that month.”

For transferring data, this is also charged per TB. Depending on the cloud provider and region, data transfer costs range between $3.07 and $190 a TB.

Factors Influencing Snowflake Storage Costs

Factors influencing the Snowflake storage cost include:

• Cloud provider: Pricing differs across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Region: Similarly, region is a factor when looking at Snowflake storage costs, with South America being the most expensive region.
• Transfers: There is no extra charge for transferring data within the same cloud provider and region; charges are levied when data is transferred between regions within the same cloud, or between cloud providers.
• Duration: With storage being charged per month, obviously the duration of storage is a key factor in Snowflake storage cost
• Retention: Policies can affect costs, for example Time Travel and Fail-Safe settings

The next question is, how does the Snowflake storage cost compare to leading competitors?

Comparing Snowflake Storage Costs to Competitors

Depending on your data needs, there are several ways to potentially reduce Snowflake storage costs. Some of these competitor costs are as follows (note that not all competitors offer the same functionality):

• AWS S3 (Glacier tier):  $4.30 per TB per month
• Amazon Redshift managed storage: $24.58 per TB per month
• Google BigQuery (Active logical storage): $20.48

This is obviously not a completely even comparison, as Snowflake is a fully managed solution with inbuilt SQL querying for example, while S3 is for general-purpose object storage and would need external tools to achieve this functionality. 

Tips to Optimize Snowflake Storage Costs

There are several ways to keep Snowflake storage costs down:

• Keep an eye on cloud storage thresholds to ensure you stay within your desired range
• You can duplicate tables and this doesn’t count as extra data
• Make use of Snowflake’s automatic data compression – remember, stored data is only charged for post compression
• Ensure your data retention policies are optimized
• Archive data you don’t use often, for example to S3 or Blob storage
• There are more technical ways of lowering costs, such as offloading data from Snowflake into a Databricks delta uniform table format and then reading the data back into Snowflake as iceberg tables. 

FAQ

Q: What are the storage pricing options in Snowflake?

A: The Snowflake storage costs comprise on-demand and capacity pricing options. These in turn are influenced by the cloud provider and region chosen.

Q: Are there different Snowflake storage tiers?

A: There are different tiers, ranging from Tier 1 to Tier 7, based on a USD amount. (https://www.snowflake.com/legal-files/CreditConsumptionTable.pdf for reference if required. Please delete after review)

Q: How does compression impact Snowflake storage costs?

A: Compression lowers Snowflake storage costs, but Snowflake automatically compresses data in any event. 

Q: Can I predict my monthly Snowflake storage cost?

A: Calculating and predicting your monthly Snowflake storage cost is relatively straightforward, especially if data has not been transferred across cloud providers. This is the standard cost you pay per TB, charges across your monthly storage usage. 

Q: How does Snowflake’s storage pricing compare with AWS and Google Cloud?

A: Generally, costs across storage providers such as Snowflake, AWS and Google are relatively similar –  though it’s important to take into account the various functionalities offered by each provider. Depending on the region, this is usually around $23 per TB of storage. 

Meet SQream: Industry-leading GPU-Accelerated Data Processing

Data analytics is key to growing your business, and ensuring industry leadership in years to come. SQream is dedicated to enabling this capability, thanks to its GPU-accelerated data processing abilities.

Now you can run complex queries on petabytes of data, uncovering insights and making vastly better business decisions. 

SQream seamlessly integrates with Snowflake, empowering you to enrich your data ecosystem by harnessing its GPU-accelerated engine for more complex analytics and quicker data preparation. The combined power of Snowflake’s robust data warehousing capabilities and SQream’s accelerated analytics unleash new opportunities, delivering faster insights and reducing overall costs.

And when it comes to keeping Snowflake storage costs down, having SQream in your corner is a no-brainer. Research shows that SQream can process data at twice the speed and half the cost.

Want to learn more about how you can use SQream to keep Snowflake storage costs down, while actually increasing performance? Get in touch with SQream today. 

Summary

Snowflake is a powerful tool for your business, but keeping Snowflake storage costs down is a headache that many people in your position are grappling with.

We looked at the drivers of Snowflake storage costs, tips to minimize these, as well as how SQream can be integrated into your Snowflake solution to decrease costs while boosting performance significantly.