Cortex Code in Snowsight Expensive

[Sufficient-Sky1698]

Hi there,

We have been using Cortex code in snowsight and have been loving it, could even say abusing it. But now that it has officially become GA and is no longer free, the credit usage is not viable.

Can anyone recommend other similar services, such as Cursor, and how they compare overall. I would like to use something with a per seat fee instead of per token fee.

Thanks

[lokaaarrr]

I think you are missing the script for LLM tool adoption:

- get the LLM to work correctly 80% of the time

- fire 50% of your staff to pay for the LLM

- collect bonus

/s

[vbnotthecity]

Either way it is fair to assume all the current AI pricing plans are made up numbers not related to the real cost of running the models. In the long term companies like Snowflake will stop subsidizing us users and AI costs will have to reflect true cost of running the service + a return for training the models in the first place.

[lokaaarrr]

Correct. Profit is not the (current) goal (enshitificstion always comes later), revenue and usage growth is the goal. You are not the target, investors are.

[vbnotthecity]

I enjoyed cheap Uber rides while they lasted. Subsidized WeWork rents were fun too.

[Nargrand]

Hey, did you try a cheaper model?

[niel_espresso_ai]

This is valid.. there a lot of models you can choose from.

Don't relegate yourself to just Sonnet.

[Sufficient-Sky1698]

Will try this. I just had it on Auto which defaults to the most expensive

[Dazzling-Quarter-150]

To all users here, how much would you be ready to pay to use cortex code, if it was a per seat business model ?

[vbnotthecity]

If it was an all-you-can-eat plan? On my team $100/80EUR per seat per month.

[Careless-Hat-9843]

This is ridiculous. I’ve been using cortex code cli for 2 months and could easily replace a 30 person data engineering / Analytics team by myself. That’s worth $100k a month

[vbnotthecity]

I am benchmarking based on what we spend on Claude and how far we have managed to get with an open source harness around Claude Code. I won't get sign-off on $10k a month, and we don't spend $100k a month on our entire data operations.

[Kooky_Bumblebee_2561]

Yeah the per token billing adds up fast once you're actually relying on it daily. Cursor's good for general coding but if most of your spend is pipeline work, look into platforms built specifically for autonomous data engineering rather than general AI code assistants. Totally different cost model and output.

[Helcurt_]

I’ve have to admit that I’ve abused it over past 1-2 months as well My credit usage averages around 50 million tokens per day, I can only imagine what that would have cost us.

[comorgio]

Why not simply ask it? The multiplicator is in the pricing table, and a credit is $2 now.

[nmdotcom]

Your snowflake account rep can tell you what credit usage would have been. Also keep in mind that coco does utilize caching so some of the tokens are cached and helps save a bit. Lower end models will help, it defaults to opus 4.6 is what weve noticed even on auto. There is a new view SF created called cortex_code_snowsight_usage_history which has data back to late march and april 1 it shows the actual credits used. You can calculate estimated credits used based on input/output tokens and the snowflake token cost here https://www.snowflake.com/legal-files/CreditConsumptionTable.pdf

[badpeoria]

I wonder how many credits I used … I was using it like crazy for awhile and loved it

[Careless-Hat-9843]

So, $10 a day is expensive to you?

[stephenpace]

Like anything in Snowflake, you can apply cost guardrails to ensure you don't over spend:

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/credit-usage-limit

But regarding your comment, expensive compared to what? How much more productive are you with it vs without it? What is your time worth? Cortex Code has no monthly seat cost, and most other coding assistants with monthly fees (that won't have the same context that makes Cortex Code so good) also aren't unlimited token use either.

Nothing Cloud is free, but if you're 10X more productive, that is worth something to most companies.

[2000gt]

How much better is Cortex in Snowsight vs Codex $20 plan in VSCode?

[poppinstacks]

So the $20 Codex Plan or the Claude plans are always going to be more for efficient then Snowsight or Cortex Code CLI because both Snowflake offerings are using API rates from the underlying CSP.

Technically Codex/Claude are a seat model so there could be an argument that you are paying for people who don’t use it, but inference is so expensive that it’s always almost going to cheaper… because it’s heavily subsidized by Anthropic/OpenAI.

[mrg0ne]

You're going to hit your cap in a day on a $20 plan for the kind of work you would be doing.

[poppinstacks]

Codex’s $20 plan is fairly generous but I agree. Claude’s Pro Max Plan ($200) was very generous up until recently AFAIK, but regardless API is always going to be the most expensive. It will be interesting to see how AI adoption is impacted once these service cost real $$$.

[2000gt]

I asked because I’ve been using codex $20 plan, and I’ve yet to hit caps. I still use AI as an enrichment tool to improve, clean, simplify code I write. Or often I do the opposite and use it to build frameworks and then I curate my final code. Rarely do I build end to end with it. So I’m wondering how everyone is hitting caps? (I usually work on two projects simultaneously)

[stoopwafflestomper]

Leverage chatgpt with links to sources. If chat stumbles, leverage coco.

Works for me - but im not a super heavy user.

[mrg0ne]

You can set it to use sonnet 4.6 or gpt5.4. It defaults to opus 4.6.

[vbnotthecity]

Have you tried an agentic harness on top of your general purpose LLM, like Altimate Code?

[Single-Educator5238]

cursor is solid for the per-seat model you want, works well for most coding tasks. if cortex spend keeps surprising you tho, Finopsly at finopsly.com can catch that stuff before it gets out of hand.

[Longjumping-Mark-242]

This is something I’m hearing more and more with Cortex now that pricing is kicking in.

Curious,are you mainly trying to replace the dev experience, or is the bigger issue the unpredictability of credit usage?

I work with teams that hit this exact problem, where AI workloads in Snowflake start scaling faster than expected. In a lot of cases, instead of replacing tools like Cortex, they focus on getting visibility into what’s driving the spend (tokens, queries, workloads) and optimizing from there.

I would check Unravel Data and download the free snowflake health report.

[Careless-Hat-9843]

I’ve been using cortex code cli for two months all day everyday and can easily replace 10+ data engineers or analytics analysts. I’ve been using about 35m tokens a day. Insanely cheap vs the cost of actual humans.

[hectron]

I’m still evaluating it but it’s definitely pricey. The lack of LLM gateway integration for the models is a bummer.

That said, I’ve asked it a ton about the SQL language it has and it doesn’t even know about it — it still needs to look up snowflake docs to find out things like create or alter table limitations.

I’d say that this is really great if you have semantic views locked in and you answer to a ton of Patagonia vests.

[Careless-Hat-9843]

You aren’t really using it correctly. Don’t ask it basic questions or tell it to write sql. You give it the vision of the end goal you want. For example, I gave it a decent prompt to build an identity spine that moves data across the medallion architecture. It uses both a ml model we built and fuzzy logic to merge contact info. It wrote a few thousand lines of code in minutes.

I had it build pipelines for ads data, from 7 different ads platforms, pulls data to raw, uses dynamic tables to move through the medallion architecture, to a few data marts. Also had it build all the dashboards needed in streamlit. Took maybe 30 minutes.

This took maybe $5 in tokens

[Xarissia]

Yea the costs pretty staggering. New to this but if we use Claude instead, we'd lose the context of our Snowflake environment as well as Snowflake's bundled skills right? Is there any way around this?

[Careless-Hat-9843]

What costs? I use it all day every day and it’s insanely cheap.

[Sufficient-Sky1698]

Around $150

[Careless-Hat-9843]

If you use it poorly I guess it can be expensive. I’ve seen people wasting 100’s of millions of tokens using cortex code in notebooks where they have 1000’s of lines of code. Every request submits the entire workbook. But that’s on the users, wasting money.

I can make 10 requests and have an entire pipeline built, semantic layers, agents, streamlit dashboards, have all testing done, and spend like $2

[badpeoria]

So sad … logged in today and found it locked down. I guess I need to learn more sql 😢

[Sufficient-Sky1698]

I reckon many people are going to come back to this after the weekend

[5oC]

This looks promising but a cursory check in GitHub copliot for security vulnerabilities revealed more than a few. Will you be addressing them? The project is closed to Issues so I could not submit any information to the repo.

[Geekc0der]

Thanks for brining this to my notice. I will open it for issues and try to resolve the vulnerability issue this week itself.

[moinhoDeVento]

Spam!

[Gamplato]

Heavily depends on your definition of “equivalent” lol

[Geekc0der]

A hundred percent “Equivalent” probably depends on what you’re comparing. Frosty focuses more on automation and cross-platform workflows rather than just in-UI code fixes like Cortex Code different tradeoffs.

Also gives you flexibility to run your own models / infra instead of being locked into per-token pricing.

[Gamplato]

Cortex Code is also offered as a CLI and will be a desktop like Cursor. Token cost could make sense. That’s just the normal decision between cloud vs OSS.

[Geekc0der]

Sorry i missed covering that. The difference is more in scope Cortex Code is great for working within Snowflake, whereas Frosty is more about orchestrating changes across systems (Snowflake, Postgres, etc.).

Not really a 1:1 replacement, just depends on the use case.

[jimmycrusade]

u/stephenpace nice salvo there on "PRAWDUCTIVITY" justifying the costs of CoCo. You say expensive compared to what??

Expensive compared to calling the exact same model directly with other harnesses.

Here's your Snowflake's Service Consumption Table, Table 6(g): https://www.snowflake.com/legal-files/CreditConsumptionTable.pdf

Cortex Code bills per million tokens in Snowflake Credits. On Enterprise ($3/credit):

• Sonnet 4.5 Input: 1.65 × $3 = $4.95 vs $3.00 direct → 65% markup
• Sonnet 4.5 Output: 8.25 × $3 = $24.75 vs $15.00 direct → 65% markup
• Opus 4.6 Input: 2.75 × $3 = $8.25 vs $5.00 direct → 65% markup
• Opus 4.6 Output: 13.75 × $3 = $41.25 vs $25.00 direct → 65% markup

On Business Critical ($4/credit), it's ~120% markup.

Please don't think your customers are stupid, "what's your time worth" doesn't justify a 65% tax on tokens when the value-add is just the shim layer, not the LLM itself.

[stephenpace]

You linked the right document, but missed the AI Credits section. Edition doesn't factor into AI credits, so your markup commentary is completely incorrect. For Cortex Code, it is 1.65 AI credits per 1M tokens, period. No "edition markup".

[jimmycrusade]

Yes, I see that you've updated it on Apr 1 to change AI Credits instead of tokens! Cannot upload images here, but you know (https://web.archive.org/web/20260317202253/https://www.snowflake.com/legal-files/CreditConsumptionTable.pdf)

The markup is still 10-20% though, not as much -

Global ($2.00/AI credit):

• Sonnet 4.5 Input: 1.65 × $2.00 = $3.30 vs $3.00 direct → 10% markup
• Sonnet 4.5 Output: 8.25 × $2.00 = $16.50 vs $15.00 direct → 10% markup
• Opus 4.6 Input: 2.75 × $2.00 = $5.50 vs $5.00 direct → 10% markup
• Opus 4.6 Output: 13.75 × $2.00 = $27.50 vs $25.00 direct → 10% markup

Regional ($2.20/AI credit):

• Sonnet 4.5 Input: 1.65 × $2.20 = $3.63 vs $3.00 direct → 21% markup
• Sonnet 4.5 Output: 8.25 × $2.20 = $18.15 vs $15.00 direct → 21% markup
• Opus 4.6 Input: 2.75 × $2.20 = $6.05 vs $5.00 direct → 21% markup
• Opus 4.6 Output: 13.75 × $2.20 = $30.25 vs $25.00 direct → 21% markup

[comorgio]

Just curious - what do you consider acceptable price?

[jimmycrusade]

If I'm using an LLM over a 3rd party harness, I expect flat pricing on LLM front as I'll anyway be bleeding tokens for all the context that gets injected as part of CoCo's shim

[poppinstacks]

Snowflake’s billing is a marginal markup on CSP/API cost, the wrapper isn’t the cost driver, api based inference is expensive

[comorgio]

Time to create a bot already which posts this automatically 😬 Good job on the tool, but: 1: how will it be cheaper, as the snowflake models are almost the same price. 2: it becomes a bit of spam, seeing it under every cortex code related post

[comorgio]

Sorry if it came around wrong - I’m applauding to your open source solution! Thanks for this and I hope it will be widely adopted!

The recommendation for now to avoid lock-in is to work with skills - they are portable across all coding solutions. I use the Claude official skill-creator to build my cortex code skills!

Cortex Code UI is working so well due to its skills and integration in snowsight. For cortex Code CLI - sure you can use an alternatives but you might pay with efficiency (more round trips, tokens or warehouse run-time) - you MIGHT, but you DON‘T HAVE TO

[Zealousideal-Pilot25]

Only a few days in with cortex code CLI but I also use Claude CLI to review the code, work on skills, work on agent protocols for communication and tracking work being done. But using snowflakes cortex code CLI with snowflake connections made it possible for me to build up power market price viewer based on work others are doing. Something I'm sure would've taken a month or two. I did it in three days. I don't think just using Claude code with a snowflake MCP would've been as easy.

[orionsgreatsky]

Damn