Price a month of real CoWork questions before rollout, then cap spend with a resource budget and per-user quotas. CoWork has no seat fee. Agent tokens and tools draw AI Credits, and the warehouse that runs each generated query draws Platform Credits.
When you need this
- Finance asks for a monthly ceiling on CoWork spend before a pilot widens.
- Deep Research, Automations, and MCP clients are about to multiply the number of questions.
- A pilot's cost looked high for the answers it produced.
Evaluation criteria
AI Credit price
What does one AI Credit cost on your contract?
Look forAI Credits cost US$2.00 per AI Credit on global routing and US$2.20 on regional routing, on demand. Contract-value discounts bring them down to US$1.88 and US$2.07. Regional routing applies when cross-region inference is disabled or limited to a geography. AI Credits are separate from Platform Credits, and capacity discounts on Platform Credits do not apply to them.
Model choice
Which orchestration model will the agent use?
Look forRates per million tokens differ by model in Table 6(d) of the Service Consumption Table. Orchestration bills per million tokens at the selected model's rate. For example, claude-sonnet-5 costs 1.30 AI Credits per million input tokens and 6.50 per million output tokens. Snowflake recommends the Auto model. In the table effective October 15, 2026, gemini-3.7-flash and gemini-3.8-flash carry promotional rates that double on January 1, 2027. The gemini-4-argon rate doubles on December 1, 2026, and openai-gpt-5.6-sol may rise 25% on input and 50% on output on November 21, 2026.
Tools and warehouses
What else does each question run?
Look forCortex Analyst and Cortex Search costs add to orchestration. Cortex Search bills 6.3 AI Credits per GB of indexed data per month while resumed. The generated SQL runs on the user's default warehouse or a configured one, billed in Platform Credits, and a dedicated warehouse per agent makes that spend visible.
Account budget
Is there a ceiling on total CoWork spend?
Look forA resource budget tagged to the CoWork object with a monthly credit limit and stored procedures at thresholds, for example an alert at 80% and revoked access at 100%. Snowflake can take up to eight hours to enforce the limit after spend passes it.
Per-user limits
Can one heavy user run up the bill?
Look forA per-user quota on the CoWork domain with daily, weekly, or monthly credit limits, notifications on projected spend, and the Block action, which stops a user until the cycle resets.
Visibility
Can you see who spends what?
Look forQuery SNOWFLAKE_COWORK_USAGE_HISTORY for per-agent usage, and use Snowsight's per-user quota monitoring.
Questions to ask vendors
- How many questions a week will the pilot team ask, and which model will answer them?
- Which warehouse runs the generated SQL, and who owns its budget?
- Do Automations, Deep Research, and MCP clients draw on the same budget as interactive questions?
- What contract value tier sets our AI Credit price?
Red flags
- No resource budget or per-user quota before access widens.
- Generated SQL running on a shared warehouse sized for dashboards, where agent queries hide in the bill.
- A promotional-rate model chosen without budgeting for its rate after the increase.
- An external assistant calling Cortex Analyst through MCP, which pays for two models on every question.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 8
- Public source
- 3
- Snowflake docs: Snowflake AI pricing
- Snowflake Service Consumption Table (effective Oct 15, 2026)
- Snowflake docs: Cortex Agents
- Snowflake docs: Resource budgets for Snowflake CoWork
- Snowflake docs: Per-user quotas
- Snowflake docs: Snowflake CoWork reference
- Snowflake docs: Snowflake CoWork troubleshooting
- Reddit comment on a two-day semantic layer workshop and its cost (Jul 22, 2026)
- Reddit post from a consultant piloting Snowflake Intelligence against Power BI (Jan 3, 2026)
- Reddit comment measuring one to three minutes per multi-table answer (Jan 21, 2026)
- Snowflake Service Consumption Table (effective Oct 15, 2026)