Optimizing Snowflake Costs: What Every Data Leader Needs to Know

One of the main reasons you chose Snowflake was its usage-based pricing model.

You expected to only pay for the compute resources you consumed and said goodbye to the sunk costs of traditional infrastructure and expensive skillsets needed to manage on-prem systems.

But now that you’re a few months (or years) in, you’re seeing a different reality. Your Snowflake costs keep rising and your monthly bill probably feels a lot higher than you originally anticipated. You’re not alone—and you’re not imagining it.

You might already be trying to reduce costs by running fewer queries or cutting back on workflows. But that’s not real Snowflake cost optimization, that’s just accepting less value from your investment. Here’s the truth: Snowflake is a powerful platform, but you’re almost certainly overpaying for it.

With our exclusive WatchDog solution, we can help you reduce Snowflake spend without sacrificing performance or user experience. And we can prove it at no cost to you.

It isn’t true—you’re paying way more

Maybe we’re wrong, but you probably think that you pay for Snowflake compute something like this:

1. A query is run for a second
2. You pay for a second
3. There are negligible incidental costs like data storage
4. The second is added to your bill
5. At the end of the month, add up all the seconds and calculate the credits

If this is what you think Snowflake billing looks like, you are in the dark and don’t understand what you are actually paying for. Don’t feel bad. You’re in good company.

The Snowflake Efficiency Index (SEI)

There’s a thing at CoEnterprise we call the Snowflake Efficiency Index (SEI). It’s the ratio of time that a query runs versus the net time that is applied towards a credit. If a query ran for exactly an hour and you were charged for an hour, then that would be 1:1. You would have an Efficiency Index of 100%. But if you ran a query for thirty minutes, then you would have an Efficiency Index of 50%. Before reading any further, guess what the Efficiency Index is in your Snowflake environment? 90%, 80%, 50%? You probably assume you’re closer to 90% than 50%. You could be in for a surprise. Here’s the provable reality:

In our experience, it’s common for organizations to have an SEI as low as 25%. That means you’re paying four times more than you need to for some workloads.

If you have an annual spend of $500K on Snowflake, your time running queries might only be for $125K. That should bother you. A lot. Think about that when someone asks you to cut costs.

Can I see my SEI in Snowflake?

Guess what? You can’t. There is nothing in Snowflake metadata that allows a Snowflake customer to make this calculation. Snowflake exposes incredibly rich, enviable meta data, but not here. You can imagine why not. For example, you can see your credits consumed for compute, for cloud services, for storage, etc., but if you’re hoping for the ratio of compute time to credit time to be administratively available, you’ll be frustrated. It’s opaque. So, it could be you have 15% SEI or it could be you have a 60% SEI. No matter what efficiency you’re running at, we’re pretty sure it can be improved substantially, and we’ll prove it to you and you can calculate your overall savings from there. You’ll be thrilled.

Bottom line: you’re paying too much, and you can fix it – or you can prove us wrong with your 92% SEI and know that you can sleep at night.

The staffing impact

You could be hiring people to do what WatchDog automates. We’ve spoken to organizations that have started hiring full-time resources (or at least assigning dedicated internal staff) to monitor and configure their Snowflake environments. These roles are focused entirely on cost management, query optimization, and usage monitoring. While that’s a step in the right direction, there’s a better way.

WatchDog automates what you’re hiring people to do—faster, smarter, and more consistently. And it never takes a day off. You get all the benefits of a team of Snowflake performance engineers without the cost and variability of manual tuning. Our customers tell us the ROI is immediate.

So, why can CoEnterprise figure this out and we can’t?

We’ve done some serious homework. We’ve reverse-engineered the compute billing model, considered a multitude of factors, and can juggle the trade-offs that exist between cost and user experience. We know where to look, why to look there, and where the levers are hidden. And we keep you fully in control for what matters most to you and your organization.

How do we do it? We have a solution called WatchDog and its bite is as big as its bark. WatchDog will continually monitor your environment, optimizing your Snowflake account for cost and making sure that your users remain delighted. It provides fine-grained control over your Snowflake compute and your results will be stunning.

See your SEI—and your savings—today (for free)

We’ll do the first SEI analysis for free. It takes just 30 minutes of your time and doesn’t require access to any sensitive user data. We’ll show you:

• Your current Snowflake Efficiency Index
• A detailed breakdown of where your credits are going
• What you could have saved in the last 30 days with WatchDog
• How much you could save moving forward

No fluff, no obligation—just real data.

No quicker way to cost reduction with Snowflake

You’ve been losing money in Snowflake since you started reading this article. In less than 30 minutes, we can provide you with a reliable estimate of what you would have saved with WatchDog if you’d installed it 30 days ago.

Click here to schedule your FREE assessment or email us at analytics@coenterprise.com!