Part 1: Cut Costs and Scale Fast: Why Snowflake Beats On-Premise Servers

Cloud Computing to Stop Costly On-Premise Server Upgrades

What if your company finally hits that success moment—like a long-awaited, huge increase in sales? Are you infrastructure-ready for that? Surely, your company doesn’t need to invest in a whole suite of new on-premise servers that come with many other costs and concerns: maintenance, upgrades, troubleshooting, software, and more.

Cloud data solutions like Snowflake are made for exactly this: quick and easy scalability.

In this first article of a mini-series focused on discovering Snowflake, I’ll explain what makes Snowflake unique, why it is an ETL toolbox, and outline the fundamentals of how its pricing works (spoiler: it’s not straightforward).

Decoupling Storage and Compute Needs

Snowflake’s approach to its data platform is to make it very clear where your costs stand—whether storage or compute. Even if you’re not scaling up due to that huge increase in sales, your data storage costs less, and you don’t pay for any compute power if you don’t need it.

Toolbox for Data ETL

Snowflake has been around for a while now, and today it holds a strong position in the data platform landscape:

• Mature system operations: management, security, integration with third-party cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.), metadata.

• Full ETL capabilities (not yet full ELT, though enabled via DBT connector) and analysis through MMP and virtual warehouses. More on ELT and Analytics Engineering in a coming article.

• Flexible & automated storage: supports structured & unstructured data, compression, format optimization, automatic replication & scaling. And, as mentioned, the decoupling of storage from compute costs.

All of this makes Snowflake a well-structured, polished, efficient, and flexible ETL toolbox.

Virtual Warehouses

In Snowflake, a virtual warehouse is essentially an adaptable workspace where the user performs all data manipulations—mainly load & transform tasks.

It’s adaptable because it automatically adjusts to the size of your data, operating as an independent compute cluster without impacting other virtual warehouses.

For companies, this is where Snowflake eliminates the operational infrastructure of servers and their comparatively higher costs.

Talking about cost, here’s a table that helps illustrate how data scale affects pricing:

Understanding Pricing

Using this first pricing tier, users can quickly see how compute costs work.

For storage costs, credits are not used. Snowflake charges a fixed monthly fee per terabyte (TB), paid in currency (USD/EUR), meaning you pay the same fee whether you use 500 GB or 1 TB. This applies to every additional TB as well (billed per increment of 1 TB).

Storage is allocated after Snowflake compresses the data. Note that this monthly fee is based on your average storage usage, as measured by your cloud provider.

Credits

Not everything in Snowflake is simple—payment is one of those complexities. Users pay for:

• Credits, which are depleted only when resources are actively used in Snowflake.

• Storage fees, billed monthly in currency (not credits).

Credits are consumed when:

• a virtual warehouse is running,

• tasks in the cloud service layer are executing,

• serverless features are leveraged,

• and other operations are performed.

The price per credit and the storage fee both depend on the chosen cloud provider and server location.

Egress vs. Ingress

As mentioned, pricing isn’t that simple. Beyond storage fees and credit usage, there are also data transfer costs.

• Ingress: data moving into Snowflake.

• Egress: data transferred out of Snowflake (e.g., to another cloud provider or region).

For example, here’s a breakdown from AWS:

Snowflake Editions & Features

Since not all companies are the same, Snowflake offers four editions:

• Standard: a cost-efficient, feature-rich solution for most SMEs.

• Enterprise: adds more features for clients who need to scale further.

• Business Critical: designed for sensitive data and recovery options.

• Virtual Private Snowflake: top-level security with dedicated environments.

Basically, the higher you go, the more features you unlock.

A 30-Day Free Trial

You may be thinking: “Okay… this will cost me quite a bit, right?”

Well, it depends on your needs: the size of your data, what you want to do with it, your cloud provider, server location, and whether you’ll be transferring data.

What is clear, though, is that Snowflake is far less costly than buying, maintaining, and upgrading your own in-house servers when scaling up.

And you can simply try it out: Snowflake offers a free 30-day trial with 400 credits included.

👉 Sign up for the free trial here.

Conclusion

Are you convinced of the usefulness of Snowflake? I am. Over the coming weeks, I’ll publish more articles unpacking this powerful data platform.

Feel free to contact me for inquiries, data-related projects, or just questions.