Cloud cost
Snowflake credit
Snowflake's unit of compute billing. A virtual warehouse burns credits every second it runs, at a rate that doubles with each warehouse size.
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Definition
A credit isn't a fixed dollar amount — Snowflake doesn't publish a $/credit list price, and the real rate varies by edition, cloud provider, region, and contract. What is published is the credits-per-hour table: an X-Small warehouse burns 1 credit/hour, and each size step up doubles that, all the way to 512 credits/hour at 6X-Large.
Billing runs per second, with a 60-second minimum charged every time a warehouse resumes from auto-suspend. That minimum, not the warehouse size table, is usually where a chatty workload's credit burn actually comes from.
Where it shows up
A Snowflake credit shows up on the account's usage page as the billing unit for compute, with the credits-per-hour rate for each warehouse size published in Snowflake's own documentation, doubling at every size step from X-Small up to 6X-Large on that same published pricing table, at no fixed dollar rate.
What makes it expensive
Warehouse size is the number everyone looks at, and it is not where a chatty workload's credits actually go. Every auto-resume bills a 60-second minimum, however short the query that woke it. Break credit consumption out per warehouse and count resumes rather than query time, because the two rankings often disagree completely.
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