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Or am I missing something here.
I don't have any experience with them but I went to the pricing section on their website[0] and was greeted with very large all-caps text: PRICING: WHY PAY FOR WHAT YOU DON’T USE? PAY FOR THE COMPUTE AND STORAGE YOU ACTUALLY USE. I found that pretty funny given the problem you're running in to. [0] https://www.snowflake.com/pricing/
You only pay for what you use, but you must purchase their virtual currency Snowbux, at least 10,000 units per year.
It sounds like the OP wanted to get 15% discount, which required them to prepay for 10,000 usage credits that expire after a year.
It's not Snowflake fault if you didn't use the prepaid amount that allowed OP to gain the 15% discount.
Only prepay for things you know you'll entirely use
I've been thinking about trying out snowflake, but I feel like for most companies, if you have someone that can design a data warehouse schema, you can probably manage fine. Most small businesses just need to pre-aggregate their metrics and feed them into a DW/OLAP system. Then you can just have a software engineer build an API and some visualisations around the metrics.
From personal experience working on Fortune 500 projects, the challenge is actually defining the metrics, hierarchies and dimensions. You have to understand the business well, and also be technical to understand how it translates into a data warehouse.
I just started the coursera specialization on data warehousing [1]. While I do have some exposure to dimensional models and hierarchies, I think this will be an awesome experience to build a data warehouse myself.
[1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-warehousing
Your complaint is that they require you to purchase a new annual contract after your first one ends? This really shouldn't come as a surprise. And they'll let you roll over $9000 worth of unused credits by purchasing just $1000 new ones? This actually sounds like a pretty good deal. I think your problem is that you purchased more than you needed via a contract you didn't understand.
I learned this lesson when making a $XM multi-year contract with AWS. They said "customer will be signed up for enterprise support", which we read as "customer gets enterprise support for free". Then we started getting bills for enterprise support ($1K/month). The contract said that, but was a bit vague; it was totally on us to ask for clarification up front.
Your complaint is that they require you to purchase a new annual contract after your first one ends? This really shouldn't come as a surprise. And they'll let you roll over $9000 worth of unused credits by purchasing just $1000 new ones? This actually sounds like a pretty good deal. I think your problem is that you purchased more than you needed via a contract you didn't understand.
Obviously OP made a mistake here, and it seems that they're admitting that, but if what they said was true, this company was being deceptive about the contract.
My personal experience has been that sometimes I get really upset about perceived fraud, only to discover later on that I'd missed something in the fine print, or misunderstood something in the relevant laws.
If you're confident that you've been defrauded, you might consider getting in touch with your local attorney general (or whatever the appropriate government office is where you work).