Why is Snowflake so expensive

EDIT: There it is: https://www.snowflake.com/

Data warehousing, basically.

Nonetheless I agree with the basic points of the article.

Then of course you can perfectly right size your instances and pay by the second for compute and by the byte for storage.

These two are connected vessels.

Ops. Unless your core competency is running reports and spark nodes, it's probably cheaper to outsource the management of Spark and friends than to hire people to make sure it's always up and running. To be fair I haven't touched Spark in many years but having to page someone who was good enough to spark to debug why a job stopped at 3am isn't fun.

This is not true. Snowflake has done just that - it has continuously improved performance resulting in reduced credit consumption and revenue from customers on a unit compute/storage basis. And it has negatively impacted their revenues and stock price. Snowflake's incentive is to strengthen their competitive position and to hopefully generate more long-term revenue from their customers.

The CFO forecasted a $97 million dollar short fall when guiding for 2022 revenue resulting from product improvements. Snowflake stock dropped immediately after.

See Q4 transcript -- https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2022/03/02/sn...

"Similarly, phased throughout this year, we are rolling out platform improvements within our cloud deployments. No two customers are the same, but our initial testing has shown performance improvements ranging on average from 10% to 20%. We have assumed an approximately $97 million revenue impact in our full-year forecast, but there is still uncertainty around the full impact these improvements can have. While these efforts negatively impact our revenue in the near term, over time, they lead customers to deploy more workloads to Snowflake due to the improved economics."

Also see the Bloomberg article -- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-02/snowflake....

"Snowflake Inc., a software company that helps businesses organize data in the cloud, dropped the most ever in a single day Thursday after projecting that annual product sales growth would slow from its previous triple-digit-percentage pace.

Executives said improvements to the company’s data storage and analysis products will let customers get the same results by spending less, which will hurt revenue in the short term, but attract more clients in the future.

“The full-year impact of that next year is quite significant,” Chief Executive Officer Frank Slootman said on a conference call Wednesday after the results were released. But “when customers see their performance per credit get cheaper, they realize they can do other things cheaper in Snowflake and they move more data into us to run more queries.”"