Snowflake Data Clean Rooms: pricing, features, API and alternatives

Snowflake's clean room lets two or more Snowflake accounts work on each other's data while each owner keeps control. Advertisers use it for audience overlap, segmentation, incrementality and lookalike modelling. Publishers and retail media networks use it to let brands measure campaigns on their data.

The product came from an acquisition. Snowflake agreed to buy Samooha on 18 December 2023 and closed the deal two days later; Samooha's CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and CTO Abhishek Bhowmick joined Snowflake (Snowflake blog). Samooha already ran as a Snowflake Native App, which is why its tables and procedures still carry the samooha_by_snowflake prefix. On 28 March 2024 Snowflake made the app generally available in its Marketplace at no additional cost (InfoWorld).

In 2026 Snowflake rebuilt the product around "collaborations". The new design previewed on 5 February 2026 and went GA on 9 April 2026. It allows any number of parties with flexible roles (Snowflake release notes, 9 April 2026). ML Jobs, which train and score models in isolated containers, reached GA in July 2026 (Snowflake, 8 July 2026). Kroger Precision Marketing says it uses ML Jobs to run its incrementality science inside the room.

A collaboration is defined in YAML. It names one owner, any number of data providers and analysis runners, and the resources they share (Snowflake docs):

• Data offerings: live views of a provider's tables, with a spec that controls exposed columns and policies.
• Templates: JinjaSQL queries that runners can execute with parameters.
• Code specs: Python functions that templates can call, for ML or custom logic.

Results come back to the runner, or are "activated" (saved) to a named collaborator's account. Free-form SQL is possible only if the collaboration and the data offering allow it.

Control rests with each data owner. In a collaboration, the data offering's spec decides which columns are exposed and which policies apply (Snowflake docs). The older provider and consumer API spells this out as join policies (columns others may join on), column policies (columns they may project) and activation policies (what may leave) (Snowflake docs, legacy policies). There, a policy is enforced only where a template applies the matching filter. Snowflake therefore tells owners to read partner templates before approving them.

Differential privacy is optional and off by default. When on, it adds noise to numeric results and charges each query against a privacy budget per account that refreshes daily (Snowflake docs, differential privacy). It does not enforce minimum group sizes by itself; owners add those separately.

Partners in other regions or clouds must turn on Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment before they can join. Every action is available through the Collaboration API as stored procedures, and since 24 September 2026 also in the Snowsight interface (Snowflake release notes, 24 September 2026).

Snowflake does not publish a price for the clean room itself. Its documentation says you incur charges "in accordance with your contract with Snowflake" (Snowflake docs, operational costs, accessed 9 November 2026). The cost has three parts:

Snowflake's general price list is consumption-based. Customers buy credits on demand or as pre-paid capacity, and the credit price depends on edition, cloud and region; storage is a separate monthly fee (Snowflake pricing options, accessed 9 November 2026). Edition matters here. Data providers need Enterprise Edition, and so does activating results to another account; owners and runners can use Standard Edition. Trial accounts cannot use clean rooms (Snowflake docs).

Strengths

• No data movement for Snowflake shops. Data offerings are live views, so there is no extract to build or refresh.
• Neutral by design. Snowflake says it "doesn't sell identity or media as part of its clean room" (company claim, product page). Identity comes from connectors you choose.
• Real ML in the room. ML Jobs bring distributed training, custom packages and GPU compute into a multiparty collaboration (Snowflake, 8 July 2026).
• Familiar billing. Costs land on the same credit invoice as the rest of the warehouse.

Limits

• Everyone needs Snowflake. Partners without an account must use third-party (publisher-subscriber) accounts, because clean room managed accounts are deprecated (Snowflake docs, end of life).
• A forced migration. Legacy provider and consumer rooms stop being creatable in the web app from 1 October 2026. The web app closes on 1 February 2027, and all legacy rooms become inaccessible on 1 June 2027 (Snowflake docs, end of life).
• Template review is manual work. In the legacy API an owner's join or column policy only bites if the template checks it, so owners must read every partner template.
• No consent management. Snowflake states the product does not manage data subject consent; customers must secure it (Snowflake docs, connectors).

• The price Snowflake paid for Samooha, and the date of the LeapYear acquisition. Neither appears in the sources read.
• Whether the app is still "no additional cost". The March 2024 GA report says so; the current cost page speaks only of charges under contract.
• Snowflake credit prices. The pricing page loads them by region in a script that did not render; we do not estimate them.
• Whether Snowflake documents PAIR or ADMaP support. We found no statement.

1. Snowflake, "Snowflake Announces Agreement to Acquire Samooha" (18 December 2023; closing note 20 December 2023). https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/snowflake-to-acquire-samooha/
2. InfoWorld, "Snowflake's Data Clean Room promises to ease analysis of PII data" (28 March 2024). https://www.infoworld.com/article/2336670/snowflakes-data-clean-room-promises-to-ease-analysis-of-pii-data.html
3. Snowflake documentation, "Overview of Snowflake Data Clean Rooms" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/overview
4. Snowflake documentation, "Snowflake Data Clean Rooms operational costs" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/cleanroom-cost
5. Snowflake documentation, "Understanding Snowflake Data Clean Room policies", legacy provider and consumer rooms (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/v1/policies
6. Snowflake documentation, "Differential privacy in Snowflake Data Clean Rooms" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/differential-privacy
7. Snowflake documentation, "End of life for legacy Provider and Consumer Data Clean Rooms" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/pc-eol
8. Snowflake documentation, "Snowflake Data Clean Rooms: Activation connectors" (accessed 9 November 2026). https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cleanrooms/connector-activation
9. Snowflake release notes, "Apr 9, 2026: Snowflake Data Clean Rooms updates". https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/2026/other/2026-04-09-dcr
10. Snowflake release notes, "Sep 24, 2026: Snowflake Data Clean Rooms updates". https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/2026/other/2026-09-24-dcr