# One Claude Code skill that runs a Snowflake cost audit from ACCOUNT_USAGE

Most Snowflake “cost tips” posts end with a screenshot of a worksheet. Useful once. Useless the twentieth time you reopen the same tab at month-end.

If you already live in **Claude Code**, the better packaging is a **skill**: a `SKILL.md` that tells the agent *when* to run a FinOps pass, *which* read-only `ACCOUNT_USAGE` scripts to execute, *how* to interpret idle burn vs attributed credits, and *what* the written report should look like for your team.

### What the Cost Guardrail skill does

In one invocation (`/cost-guardrail` or “run a Snowflake cost audit”), the skill walks a fixed sequence:

1. **Idle warehouse burn** — warehouse metering credits minus query-attributed credits (the auto-suspend / idle gap `QUERY_ATTRIBUTION_HISTORY` deliberately leaves out).
2. **Top costly queries** — outliers by attributed credits, plus recurring parameterized hashes that quietly dominate the month.
3. **Guardrail gaps** — warehouses that never suspend, suspend slowly, or have no resource monitor; a light queued-vs-spill cue for sizing judgment.
4. **Storage / Time Travel hogs** — tables ranked by active + Time Travel + Fail-safe bytes, plus a 90-day storage trend.
5. **Monitor checklist** — what monitors exist, what’s missing, and a *commented* monthly resource-monitor template (no surprise `CREATE`/`ALTER`).

Everything is **read-only** against public Snowflake ACCOUNT_USAGE patterns. No third-party FinOps SaaS. No customer data leaves your account.

### Why a skill instead of a prompt pack

A pasted ChatGPT prompt does not ship SQL, does not remember your report template, and does not install into `.claude/skills/` for the whole team. A Claude Code skill does: drop the folder in, invoke it, get a consistent Markdown report (executive summary → idle burn → queries → gaps → storage → prioritized actions).

### A sketch of the idle-burn idea (illustrative)

Conceptually you compare:

- credits billed per warehouse from `WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY`
- credits attributed to queries from `QUERY_ATTRIBUTION_HISTORY`

The gap is your idle / non-attributed compute — the first place many accounts leak credits. (Exact skill scripts ship with the pack; treat anything in a blog post as a sketch, not production copy.)

### Get the pack

I packaged this as a **Snowflake Claude Skills** download for Claude Code users: Cost Guardrail, RBAC/Security Audit, and Performance/Cache/Spillage skills.

Get the pack on Gumroad: **[Snowflake Claude Skills Pack](https://thyneventures.gumroad.com/l/snowflake-claude-skills)** ($49, three skills, 18 read-only SQL scripts).

Or build the same habit yourself: put the workflow in `SKILL.md`, keep SQL under `scripts/`, and make Claude produce the same report every time.