Snowflake

Warehouses that are not configured to auto-suspend burn credits continuously. A Medium warehouse (4 credits/hour) left running 24/7 costs ~$5,760/month at Standard pricing, most of it wasted on idle time.

Serverless features (Snowpipe, tasks, materialized views) consume credits automatically in the background. Cloud services usage is free up to 10% of your daily compute spend, but exceeding that threshold triggers additional charges that are hard to predict.

Data transfer between regions or cloud providers costs $0.01-0.04 per GB. Cross-cloud data sharing sounds free, but the underlying transfer fees add up quickly for large datasets.

Storage costs are listed at $40/TB on-demand, but Fail-Safe storage (7-day recovery) adds ~$25/TB on top of your active storage, effectively increasing your storage bill by 60% if you have significant historical data.

Time Travel (data recovery) defaults to 1 day on Standard but can be extended to 90 days on Enterprise, each additional day of retention increases storage costs proportionally.

Enterprise edition costs ~50% more per credit than Standard ($3 vs $2). Business Critical costs ~100% more ($4 vs $2). The feature differences (multi-cluster warehouses, materialized views, enhanced security) often force mid-market companies onto Enterprise, doubling the effective compute bill.

Annual capacity commitments offer 15-40% discounts ($1.50-2.50/credit) but require upfront commitment. Overestimate and you waste money on unused credits; underestimate and on-demand overages are charged at full price.