Pay by the minute, with no annual commit.
Databasin replaces the warehouse-plus-ETL-plus-BI-plus-AI stack with one post-pay, per-minute meter. Everything lands on open Apache Iceberg by default. HIPAA is in the base SKU, and you can run it in our cloud or your own.
Everything you bought Snowflake for, plus the things you had to buy around it.
Snowflake is a warehouse. Databasin is the whole trip, from source to the people who need the answer. The stack you assembled to make Snowflake useful is already inside it, metered by the minute: the ETL tool, the BI seat, the notebook license, the AI add-on.
Stopped clusters cost $0. There are no "credits that aren't dollars" and no annual true-up conversations. Turn it off, it's off.
Open Apache Iceberg tables on open Parquet files. Query them from Trino, Databasin Sail, or bring your own. Leaving is not a migration project, because your data is already portable.
Databasin One is an agentic analyst built in, running Claude + GPT with full catalog awareness. It isn't a credit-priced add-on. Ask a question, ship the chart.
Co-created at Washington University School of Medicine, with a BAA available and no "Business Critical" tier upgrade to buy. Compliance is not a premium line item.
SaaS, or Databasin Private in your own Azure tenant with your keys and VNets. Same product, same features. Zero vendor logical access, if you want it.
Pipelines, lakehouse compute, AI tokens, storage, and dashboards on one bill. Not three vendors and a procurement deck.
The costs side by side.
Published list prices, apples to apples: Snowflake Enterprise on-demand against Databasin consumption rates. Every line is a real SKU you can verify at the source.
| Capability | Databasin | Snowflake (Enterprise) |
|---|---|---|
| Query compute: small | $1.82/hr · Sail XSmall, all nodes running (10 vCPU) | $3.00/hr · XS warehouse (1 credit/hr) |
| Query compute: medium | $6.61/hr · Sail Medium, all nodes running (35 vCPU) | $12.00/hr · M warehouse (4 credits/hr) |
| Data pipelines (ETL/ELT) | ✓$5.00/hr · included, no separate tool | —Not included · add Fivetran, Matillion, or Airbyte |
| AI / natural-language analyst | ✓$0.015 / 1K tokens · Databasin One, built in | —Cortex AI · credit-metered add-on SKU |
| BI / dashboards | ✓Included · Reportbasin + Databasin One | —Not included · add Tableau, Power BI, Sigma |
| Storage | $24 / TB / mo · snapshot-metered | ~$23 / TB / mo compressed · proprietary format |
| Table format | ✓Apache Iceberg + Parquet · open, any engine reads it | Proprietary FDN · Iceberg support exists but as a managed overlay |
| Billing model | ✓Pay-per-minute, post-pay, no commit | Credits, typically pre-purchased with annual commit |
| Billing granularity | ✓Per-minute · stopped clusters bill nothing | Per-second, with a 60-second minimum each time a warehouse resumes |
| HIPAA / BAA | ✓Base plan · BAA available | Business Critical tier (higher credit price) |
| Deployment | ✓SaaS or Databasin Private in your own Azure tenant | SaaS only · multi-tenant account on Snowflake's infra |
| Seat / user fees | ✓None | None on warehouse · but you still pay per seat on Tableau/PBI |
Snowflake does not publish the hardware behind a warehouse size, so these rows compare the list prices of each product's sizes, not equal hardware. Databasin compute is billed per node-hour for the nodes that are running.
Competitor pricing reflects published on-demand list prices for Azure regions as of early 2026. Actual costs vary by region, contract terms, and committed-use discounts. Verify at snowflake.com/pricing. Snowflake rates shown assume Enterprise edition at $3.00 / credit.
What a medium workload costs on Databasin.
A Databasin Sail Medium cluster (4 workers) running 8 hours a day, 20 business days a month, with its coordinator always on. Pipelines run 60 min/day. 500 GB stored, and two BI seats for business users.
Storage: $12 · AI (Databasin One): $45
BI & dashboards: $0 (included)
Four reasons Finance and Engineering
land on the same answer.
Snowflake is still a warehouse. Databasin is a lakehouse, a pipeline engine, an agentic analyst, and a BI surface. One governance layer sits over all of it.
Open storage, actually.
Every table is written as Apache Iceberg on Parquet, in your lake. Trino, Databasin Sail, or any engine you bring can read it without copies, rewrites, or format conversion.
Flexible where it runs.
Take our SaaS, or Databasin Private in your own Azure tenant with your keys, your VNets, and zero vendor logical access to your data. Same product in both modes.
Secure by default, not by tier.
Built inside an academic medical center. HIPAA-ready and BAA-available on the standard plan, with row-level security, column masking, and audit in the base product.
Intelligent by construction.
Databasin One is an agentic analyst built in: Claude and GPT, with full catalog awareness. It picks the tables, writes the SQL, renders the chart, and explains its work.
The costs around Snowflake that add up.
Snowflake's sticker rate is the warehouse credit. The bill you actually sign is the warehouse plus the ETL tool plus the BI seats plus the AI add-on plus the annual commit minimum. Databasin replaces that stack with one product and one invoice.
Try Databasin with $50 in credit.
$50 in credits. No card, no annual commit, no per-seat anything. Load real data, run a real query, and ask Databasin One to build you a real dashboard. Before lunch. Questions about the math? Write to us, and one of the founders will walk through it with your own numbers.