Data Gateway Billing Reverted to Time-Based — Lower Costs for 90% of Customers
We're making a billing change to the Data Gateway component that will reduce credit consumption for the vast majority of our customers.
What's Changing
Effective March 1, 2026, Data Gateway billing is moving back to time-based metering, replacing the volume-based model introduced earlier this year.
Why We're Making This Change
When we originally moved Data Gateway to volume-based billing, it was to address edge cases where time-based metering didn't reflect actual resource usage. Since then, our engineering team has made significant optimizations to the underlying infrastructure that have resolved those concerns. The original reasons for volume-based billing simply no longer apply.
More importantly, Data Gateway primarily consumes Snowflake compute resources rather than data transfer capacity. Time-based billing is a much more accurate representation of the actual resources consumed by Data Gateway jobs. Under volume-based billing, customers transferring large amounts of data within the same Snowflake account could be disproportionately charged — even though the actual cost to run those operations was driven by compute time, not data movement.
This change also simplifies our billing model. Data Gateway was the only application-type component billed as a Writer, which created unnecessary complexity. Aligning it with the standard time-based application billing makes your consumption clearer and easier to understand.
What This Means for You
After a thorough analysis of real usage data across our entire customer base, 90% of customers will see a decrease in Data Gateway credit consumption under the time-based model. For the small number of customers where usage may increase slightly, the impact is minimal — and can be further reduced by optimizing job run times.
To help you understand the impact, we'll recalculate historical billing data using the time-based model, so you can review what your future consumption will look like.
Credit Holiday Through February
To ensure a smooth transition and to make sure no one is billed under inconsistent rules, we are zeroing out all Data Gateway credits consumed through the end of February 2026. That means any Data Gateway charges already recorded for this billing period will be set to zero. Time-based billing will begin fresh on March 1, 2026.
Summary
- Effective date: March 1, 2026
- Billing model: Time-based (reverting from volume-based)
- Impact: 90% of customers will see lower costs
- February credits: Fully zeroed out — no charges during the transition
- Historical data: Recalculated so you can compare and forecast
If you have any questions about how this change affects your account, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact our support team.