List-price math only. Real Redshift bills can be cut 20-40 percent with reserved instances and concurrency-scaling tuning. Real Snowflake bills can be cut 30-50 percent by dropping auto-suspend and right-sizing warehouses. The deep audit models your actual usage data from both platforms and ranks reduction wins by dollar impact.
| Line item | Redshift | Snowflake |
|---|---|---|
| — | ||
| Size | Redshift node | Redshift $/hr | Snowflake warehouse | Snowflake credits/hr | Snowflake $/hr (Standard) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | ra3.xlplus | $1.086 | X-Small | 1 | $2.00 |
| Medium | ra3.4xlarge | $3.26 | Medium | 4 | $8.00 |
| Large | ra3.16xlarge | $13.04 | X-Large | 16 | $32.00 |
Storage on both platforms runs $23-$24 per TB per month for compressed managed storage. The compute side dominates the bill for most workloads.
One-page checklist covering both platforms — Redshift reserved instance tiers, concurrency scaling configuration, Snowflake auto-suspend tuning by workload type, warehouse right-sizing from QUERY_HISTORY, the Business Critical downgrade test, materialized view break-even, multi-cluster ceilings, and the streaming-ingest pricing surprise. Cheat sheet sent to your inbox.
Redshift: monthly_usd = node_hours_per_month × node_hourly_rate + storage_tb × 1024 × $0.024
Snowflake: monthly_usd = warehouse_credits_per_hour × hours_active × credit_rate + storage_tb × 1024 × $0.023
The two platforms diverge on what triggers compute cost. Redshift bills the node-hour rate as long as the cluster is provisioned, regardless of whether queries run. A ra3.xlplus single-node cluster left on 24/7 costs 1.086 × 730 = $792.78 per month even with zero queries. Snowflake bills only when the warehouse is up — and the warehouse suspends after the configured idle period. A Snowflake X-Small on the same 24/7 sustained workload (warehouse never gets a chance to suspend) costs 1 × 730 × $2 = $1,460 per month. Same compute class, $668 monthly delta in Redshift's favor.
Now flip the workload pattern to burst (5 percent utilization). Redshift at 730 hours still costs $792.78 — the cluster runs whether queries do or not. Snowflake at 36.5 hours costs 1 × 36.5 × $2 = $73 per month. Same compute class, $720 monthly delta in Snowflake's favor. This is why workload pattern matters more than the per-hour rate. The cheaper platform depends on what fraction of the day the warehouse actually does work.
Redshift is cheaper when the warehouse runs at sustained high utilization. The classic case is a 24/7 BI dashboard or ELT pipeline that keeps the cluster busy with consistent query traffic. At sustained 24/7 use, ra3.xlplus runs about $792/month against Snowflake X-Small at $1,460/month on Standard edition — Redshift saves roughly 46 percent. The same pattern holds at the next size up: ra3.4xlarge sustained 24/7 is about $2,380/month versus an equivalent Snowflake Medium at $5,840/month — a 59 percent gap. The reason is structural. Redshift bills per node-hour at a fixed rate regardless of query activity. Snowflake bills per warehouse credit, and credits accrue every second the warehouse is up. Always-on is efficient when fully utilized, wasteful when idle.
Snowflake feels cheaper because the first dollar is small. You can spin up an X-Small warehouse with auto-suspend at 60 seconds and the monthly bill on a burst-only workload is under $100. There is no minimum, no commitment, no idle node fee. Snowflake wins decisively at burst loads where the warehouse is suspended 95 percent of the day. But the auto-suspend that makes light loads cheap turns into a surprise when the workload grows. Once analyst dashboards query every minute, ETL pipelines refresh throughout the day, and ad-hoc queries land between, the warehouse never suspends. At that point you're paying every hour anyway — at a per-credit rate that exceeds Redshift's per-node-hour rate. Snowflake's auto-suspend is a discount, not the base price.
Migration cost almost always exceeds the savings unless the warehouse bill is north of about ten thousand dollars per month. SQL dialect differences, stored procedure rewrites, BI tool reconnection, data movement, schema flattening, ETL refactor, security model reconfiguration — a real migration is months of engineering effort. At a thousand per month of warehouse spend, even a 50 percent reduction is six thousand per year, less than the migration cost. At ten thousand per month, a 50 percent reduction is sixty thousand per year, which usually clears the bar. The better answer for most teams: stop migrating, start tuning. Snowflake bills can be cut 30-50 percent by dropping auto-suspend and right-sizing. Redshift bills can be cut 20-40 percent by switching node types, enabling concurrency scaling only when needed, and adopting reserved instances on the baseline cluster.
Redshift Serverless changes the calculus toward Snowflake's model. Serverless bills per RPU at about $0.375 per RPU-hour, with a baseline of 8 RPUs and automatic scaling up to a configurable max. There is no node-hour bill — when no queries run, no RPUs accrue. This makes Serverless competitive with Snowflake on burst workloads. The tradeoff is two-fold. Sustained 24/7 workloads still favor a provisioned cluster — at consistent load, 32 RPU-hours of serverless can exceed ra3.4xlarge fixed rate. RPU scale-up is less predictable than Snowflake's explicit warehouse-size selection — a query that suddenly demands more compute will cost more without warning. Use Serverless when the workload is genuinely bursty and baseline is unpredictable. Use provisioned RA3 when you have a steady-state floor to size for.
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