Top 4 Snowflake cost management tools

Snowflake’s cloud-native design and separation of storage and compute are part of why so many companies adopted it quickly. It lets teams spin up warehouses on demand without worrying about infrastructure management or upfront hardware costs. They can also handle workloads that would crush many traditional databases.

But this flexibility cuts both ways. The same architecture makes it easy to drive costs up without anyone noticing until the bill arrives.

And to prevent overspending, you need detailed visibility. That’s what a Snowflake cost management tool provides. It helps you understand what’s causing overspending while also guiding you on how to trim it.

In this blog, we’ll introduce you to the 4 best Snowflake cost management tools. You’ll learn about their capabilities and what to look for when choosing one of them for your environment.

Why do I need Snowflake cost management?

Snowflake scales fast and handles serious workloads. But Snowflake, for all its strengths, wasn’t built to handle cost governance on its own.

It was built for performance and flexibility, which it’s good at. But these capabilities come at a cost. They make Snowflake consume more compute and storage than you intended and can afford.

And this isn’t always due to deliberate overspending by your team. In most cases, it’s because of how Snowflake operates under the hood. 

On Snowflake, the performance of queries depends on three factors, mainly:

For instance, if your query is poorly structured, that’ll trigger unnecessary data scans. Or if a warehouse is idle, but its size is too big, that’s also going to burn credits.

Then there’s the issue of governance. Configuring roles, permissions, and policies on Snowflake requires a comprehensive knowledge of the platform. Without a good grasp of the platform’s internal workings, you may misconfigure these settings. Misconfigurations can lead to storage bloat or workloads running under higher-privilege warehouses, among other issues.

These were a few reasons why Snowflake cost management became necessary. In reality, there are many other reasons.

And to manage costs the best way, you have to use a platform designed to support Snowflake cost management.

Can I just use Snowflake native cost tools?

Snowflake does include built-in features to help manage spend, but these tools only go so far. So why invest in a third-party Snowflake cost-management platform?

Here’s what Snowflake natively provides:

Now, let’s return to our question: why not use native Snowflake tools? 

The problem is that these native tools operate more like safety nets than management or optimization engines.

They don’t help you understand why costs climbed. They can only inform you when spending has already reached a dangerous level.

Take Resource Monitors: they can tell you a warehouse exceeded its quota, but they can’t explain why. They don’t surface inefficient queries, runaway workloads, or which teams and users are driving the spike.

Snowflake also doesn’t automatically map warehouse or query usage to business units, cost centers, or environments. This makes accurate cost allocation slow, manual, and often incomplete.

If you want to track Snowflake alongside the rest of your cloud ecosystem such as AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks, or other SaaS data tools, native Snowflake features cannot provide unified visibility.

For organizations with multiple teams, fast-growing workloads, or high Snowflake usage, native tools cannot deliver the visibility, automation, or intelligence required to proactively manage spend.

A third-party Snowflake cost management platform fills those gaps by offering:

In short, Snowflake shows you what you spent. A third-party Snowflake management tool explains why it happened and how to reduce it.

The best Snowflake cost management and optimization tools

1. Ternary

Ternary is a multi-cloud FinOps platform. It gives you cost visibility and control across cloud and SaaS solutions, including Snowflake. 

Ternary’s Snowflake insights shows you query counts, run times, and the type and number of credits used over a given period, broken down by account and warehouses. With these insights, you can easily spot inefficiencies that don’t become obvious from a billing summary alone.

For example, if someone accidentally overprovisions a warehouse or if query performance starts dragging due to underprovisioning, Ternary will bring both to your attention.

With Ternary’s reporting engine you can build custom Snowflake reports for specific teams or business units easily. You can also allocate costs to the appropriate areas of your organization to determine the total cost of ownership accurately.

The platform provides industry-leading capabilities across anomaly detection, budget management, cost allocation, and forecasting, making it a great tool for organizations that require cost management and optimization across their entire infrastructure.

2. Select.dev

Select.dev is a dedicated Snowflake cost management platform. Its two main functions are Snowflake observability and optimization. Like Ternary, it also gives you a detailed visibility into credits down to individual queries, workloads, users, and teams.

In addition to providing visibility, it also continuously analyzes your account to inform you about optimization opportunities.

There’s also support for automatic warehouse adjustments. For example, it can scale virtual warehouses up or down based on actual usage patterns with zero intervention from you.

You can also allocate costs to specific teams or projects, then set budget thresholds for them so they feel accountable for their spending.

Select.dev has built-in anomaly detection too, which informs you about spikes through channels like Slack and email.

3. Datadog

Datadog isn’t exclusively a Snowflake cost management tool, but like Ternary, it does provide visibility into Snowflake.

The platform shows you metrics on query performance, warehouse activity, credit consumption, storage usage, and more.

You have access to pre-built dashboards that show things like top warehouses by cost, query throughput, failed tasks, and login history. If these dashboards aren’t the right fit for you, you can also build custom views for specific teams or business units. 

With Datadog Cloud Cost Management, you can filter costs by service, tag, or team, then track how spending trends over time. You can also view cost-per-query to identify expensive queries and trace down the code or application that triggers them.

4. Chaos Genius

Chaos Genius is a data observability tool that can also optimize costs. It analyzes usage patterns across warehouses, queries, and storage.

The platform is particularly known for its automated cloud cost optimization recommendations.

For instance, it can figure out the reason your queries are consuming so many credits and offer specific tuning suggestions.

Chaos Genius also offers insights about storage optimization. For example, it can identify unused tables that are still consuming storage or ones with high fail-safe costs. The platform’s alerts also come through Slack or email.

How to pick the best Snowflake management tool

From the Snowflake cost management tool vendors we discussed, which one is best for you?

Here’s how you can make that decision easy.

Define what you need

Do you need detailed cost visibility (who’s spending what), or automated optimization recommendations, or both? Most tools cover only visibility. Only some offer optimization recommendations.

Once you’re clear on this, the rest becomes easier because every Snowflake environment has different gaps. Some teams are strong on tuning and only need a clean breakdown of credit consumption. 

Others don’t have internal bandwidth to review every warehouse or query pattern, so they rely on tools that surface inefficiencies on their behalf. 

The real goal is to match the tool to your team’s strengths. If your engineers already understand Snowflake deeply, visibility may be enough. If not, choose a platform that brings you closer to root-cause analysis without requiring constant manual digging.

Look for granular cost allocation

Make sure the tool you’re considering allows you to attribute costs by:

Precise cost allocation creates accountable teams that spend responsibly. 

This level of detail is what prevents guesswork during budget reviews. Without proper allocation, most organizations end up chasing numbers at the end of the month, trying to figure out who consumed what. 

A strong allocation model also helps teams understand the financial impact of their daily work, which naturally leads to better resource planning. If a platform cannot break down spend in a way that mirrors your internal structure, you’ll struggle to identify the real drivers behind your Snowflake bill.

Decide the level of automation you want

Generally speaking, there are two types of cost management tools:

Your choice depends on how reactive or proactive your team wants to be. Alert-based tools give you information but expect you to take action, which suits teams that prefer reviewing every change before it happens.

Automated tools are helpful when queries spike or warehouses drift from expected usage patterns, which, of course, saves time but requires you to trust the platform’s logic. 

A tool that aligns with your operational style will always deliver better results.

Check for customizable dashboards and reporting

It’s very common for a platform’s default dashboards and reports to not fully meet your needs. So the tool you’re choosing should also let you build custom dashboards and reports based on your specific needs.

Different teams care about different metrics, so a one-size-fits-all dashboard rarely works. Finance might want rolling cost projections, while engineering needs query-level drill-downs. 

Custom views let each group track what matters to them without clutter. Reporting flexibility is just as important because you’ll eventually need to share insights with leadership, team leads, or other stakeholders. A snowflake cost management tool that lets you shape data the way you work will always give you better long-term control.

Evaluate integration and scalability

Only choose the tool that integrates well with your current Snowflake setup. Also, make sure the tool can handle growth as your Snowflake usage expands.

If a tool can’t scale with your environment, you’ll eventually outgrow it and end up migrating again, which creates unnecessary overhead.

Final thoughts

Snowflake is already a powerful platform. But at the end of the day, it still needs the right guardrails to stay cost-efficient.

A Snowflake cost management platform gives you those guardrails. Ternary provides the visibility your team needs to manage Snowflake spending with confidence.

So if you want clarity on your Snowflake costs, get started with Ternary.