I looked into Genie Code costs in Databricks — it’s cheap until it isn’t

[protmaks]

I’ve been testing Genie Code in Databricks and wanted to understand not just the UX, but the actual cost behavior.

My impression so far:

• for simple code edits / code assistance, it looks almost free,
• but if Genie Code starts doing things that involve real compute, including cluster usage, the cost goes up quickly,
• I saw scenarios that translate to about $3/hour,
• and it’s not always obvious in billing where exactly that spend is coming from.

I summarized the experiments in this article: https://medium.com/dbsql-sme-engineering/genie-code-databricks-agentic-ai-the-price-of-intelligence-...

[protmaks]

Sorry, it's my bad, not 3$ but 1.5-2$

[MrChromatic]

I was looking at the cost inferred by genie, but i'm not understanding how genie usage is calculated, i looked the system.billing.usage table, can you tell me if i can use this to filter genie usage.

[protmaks]

It's almost free, the cost appears if it runs a cluster to check the values, but they cannot be linked to Genie Code