Cloud cost
Snowflake credit
Snowflake's unit of compute billing. A virtual warehouse uses credits every second it runs, at a rate that doubles with each warehouse size.
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Definition
A credit is not a fixed dollar amount. Snowflake does not publish a list price per credit. The real rate varies by edition, cloud provider, region, and contract. What Snowflake does publish is the credits-per-hour table. An X-Small warehouse uses 1 credit an hour. Each size up doubles that, to 512 credits an hour at 6X-Large.
Billing runs per second. Each time a warehouse resumes from auto-suspend, a 60-second minimum applies. For a chatty workload, that minimum is usually where the credit use comes from. The warehouse size table is not.
Where it shows up
A Snowflake credit appears on the account's usage page as the billing unit for compute. Snowflake documents the credits-per-hour rate for each warehouse size in its own pricing table. The rate doubles at every size step from X-Small up to 6X-Large. The credit has no fixed dollar rate.
What makes it expensive
Everyone looks at warehouse size. That is not where a chatty workload's credits go. Every auto-resume bills a 60-second minimum, however short the query that woke it. Break credit use out by warehouse and count resumes, not query time. The two rankings often disagree completely.
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