On-demand accounts with a 90-day steady credit floor worth a capacity commitment

A 90-day floor under your daily burn

On-demand pricing is the most expensive way to buy Snowflake credits, and it is the right choice exactly as long as your consumption is unpredictable. Once an account shows a steady daily floor (credits it burns on the quietest days, week after week), that floor is consumption you could have pre-purchased at a capacity discount. ZopNight measures the floor as the 10th percentile of daily credit totals and fires when its 90-day average exceeds 10 credits per day, the empirical threshold that separates a real baseline from noise.

Percentile, not average

The 10th percentile is the level your consumption exceeded on 9 out of 10 days. Sizing a commitment to the average would over-commit: spiky days drag an average upward, and an over-sized capacity contract wastes money in the other direction. Sizing to the p10 floor means the contract is consumed with near-certainty and every credit above it stays flexible on-demand.

Compute the same floor yourself

The production query, adapted to run standalone:

SELECT PERCENTILE_CONT(0.10) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY daily_credits) AS p10_baseline
FROM (
  SELECT usage_date AS day, SUM(credits_used) AS daily_credits
  FROM SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE.METERING_DAILY_HISTORY
  WHERE usage_date >= DATEADD('day', -90, CURRENT_DATE)
  GROUP BY 1
);

METERING_DAILY_HISTORY covers all metered services (warehouses, serverless features, and cloud services), so the baseline reflects the whole account, not just warehouse compute. Running this needs imported privileges on the SNOWFLAKE database.

What the rule cannot see yet

Contract terms. ZopNight does not ingest your Snowflake agreement, so it cannot tell an account genuinely on on-demand from one that already holds a capacity commitment. The finding is advisory until contract-terms ingestion ships, and if you already have a contract covering the floor, the recommendation is simply satisfied. The rule also makes no claim about the discount percentage itself: capacity pricing is negotiated, so the finding quantifies the committed-consumption opportunity in credits and leaves the rate conversation to procurement.

Sizing the conversation

Bring the p10 number, not the monthly total, to your Snowflake rep. Committing to the floor keeps utilization risk near zero; growth above it continues on-demand until the next renewal, when a higher floor can be re-measured from the same query.