Snowflake's new bytes-scanned metric is worse than the old one

Snowflake is swapping its billing metric from rows processed to bytes scanned. The idea sounds reasonable — charge by the data you actually touch instead of rows you churn through. But the reality is messier.

The problem is that bytes scanned doesn't account for data that's already been filtered at the file level by Snowflake's metadata indexing. You can end up paying for bytes the engine never touched. Meanwhile, the old rows metric at least gave you a rough sense of work done. This one gives you a number that feels arbitrary.

Some shops are already seeing their bills jump on queries that look lightweight. The kind of query you run a hundred times a day — filtering a table by date — now costs more because it has to read the underlying files even though Snowflake's predicate pushdown already narrowed the set. It's a quiet tax on the queries nobody notices until the invoice arrives.

Why this matters for us: if you're running anything on Snowflake right now, check your new bill before the next statement — the change is real and it's catching people off guard.