Compare monthly cost across Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks with a single unified input. Enter TB scanned, compute hours, storage GB, and workload complexity — get three side-by-side estimates and see which warehouse is cheapest for your specific pattern. Ideal for pre-RFP sizing, migration budget framing, and answering the "should we switch?" question with numbers instead of vendor slides.
How the three platforms charge differently
Snowflake bills per-second of warehouse uptime, at a credit rate driven by edition (1.0x Standard / 1.5x Enterprise / 2.0x Business Critical / 2.5x VPS) and warehouse size (XS = 1 credit/hr, doubling each size). Cloud Services get a 10% free allowance on top of compute.
Databricks bills per-DBU (Databricks Unit) consumed. A DBU rate varies by compute tier: SQL Pro, Jobs Compute, and Serverless have different $/DBU prices. Storage is passthrough to S3/ADLS.
BigQuery has two billing models: on-demand ($6.25/TB scanned, first 1 TB/month free) and Editions ($0.04 Standard / $0.06 Enterprise / $0.10 Enterprise Plus per slot-hour). The cheaper of the two applies to your workload — this calculator auto-picks.
When each platform tends to win
Snowflake wins on bursty workloads with strong auto-suspend discipline, and when you can get a 25-40% contract discount off list. Unique strengths: data sharing, Snowpark, zero-copy clones.
BigQuery wins on truly intermittent workloads under 1-2 TB/month scanned (first-TB-free + no compute to idle) and on heavily partitioned/pruned queries.
Databricks wins on ML and heavy ETL where you mix SQL and PySpark, especially with Photon-accelerated SQL Warehouses and Serverless DBU credits.
Assumptions behind the estimate
This calculator uses published April 2026 list pricing and these normalized assumptions: Snowflake credit rate defaults to Enterprise ($3 avg), Databricks DBU rate defaults to SQL Pro list ($0.55), BigQuery auto-picks between on-demand and Enterprise Editions. Storage is priced at active-tier list (~$20-$23 per TB-month). Networking egress and long-term storage savings are NOT included. These are order-of-magnitude numbers for architecture decisions, not procurement quotes.
Platform-specific deep dives
After narrowing down, use the platform-specific calculators for a fuller picture: