Why is the cost of a query in SELECT different than the cost in Snowflake's Query Attribution History?

SELECT and Snowflake use different methodologies to calculate the cost of a query, which can cause the numbers to differ — sometimes significantly.
Snowflake's Query Attribution History table has several limitations in what it accounts for:

• Idle time — Snowflake does not factor in warehouse idle time when attributing cost to queries

• Short-running queries — Snowflake excludes queries below a certain execution time threshold

• Query Acceleration costs — Snowflake does not include query acceleration service charges

• Data transfer costs — Snowflake does not include data transfer costs driven by a query

• AI costs — Snowflake does not include AI-related costs (e.g., Cortex) attributed to a query

• Cloud Services costs — Snowflake does not include cloud services layer costs

SELECT's cost per query calculation accounts for all of the above. We look at all queries running concurrently in a warehouse alongside granular billing data, then allocate cost to each query proportional to its execution time — including idle time, query acceleration, AI, cloud services, and data transfer costs.

As a result, SELECT will often report a higher cost per query than what you see in Snowflake's Query Attribution History.

For a deeper dive into our methodology, see Calculating cost per query in Snowflake.