Data Warehouse Cost Calculators

Snowflake and Databricks are both billed in units that do not map cleanly onto the work you asked for, and both have a specific way of costing more than people expect.

Snowflake bills a warehouse for being awake, not for executing queries. A warehouse serving a steady trickle of short queries with a ten-minute auto-suspend never gets to sleep, so it bills a full day for perhaps a couple of hours of work. That idle share is invisible on a credit report, which shows only the total, and it is usually the largest single line in a Snowflake bill.

Databricks bills DBUs — and your cloud provider separately bills the virtual machines those DBUs ran on. The second invoice is normally the larger one, so a budget built from the Databricks bill alone captures roughly a third of the real cost. On top of that, the same notebook run on All-Purpose compute instead of Jobs compute costs several times more for identical work.

Both calculators here take your own contracted rate rather than publishing a list price. Neither vendor publishes machine-readable rates, both are contract-specific, and almost every customer of any size pays something other than list — so a calculator built on a published number would be quietly wrong for most of the people reading it.