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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#161

Post by cs702 »

twistedpair wrote: post #81
cs702 wrote: post #7

Great article. On the surface, it's about Snowflake. At a deeper level, the article is about the perverse incentives motivating SaaS businesses to do seemingly dumb, inefficient things and avoid seemingly obvious optimizations by default. Many SaaS businesses are perfectly happy to let customers shoot themselves in the foot if it generates more revenue. The BigQuery example (presently, by default, `select * from tabl…

FWIW, BigQuery tables can be configured to require a partition filter clause [0] in the SQL query, so that you cannot shoot yourself in the foot like that. Now if they'd just make an Organization Policy to let you turn it on by default for all new tables. [0] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/querying-partitioned-...

Yes. That's exactly the OP's point: It's up to you to remember to do the extra work necessary to avoid shooting yourself in the foot by default.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#162

Post by morelisp »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #147
morelisp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The CEO explained why they are doing it and how they are actually incentivized. The CEO explained why he thinks it's a good long term plan... but for now, they get money i.e. are actually incentivized by slow code. The CEO's incentives are theoretical ones. And the market, which ultimately control whether the CEO gets to continue that plan or not, did not seem to agree it was a good plan.

By this reasoning, everyone would shirk at work. If you think incentives only act over short time horizons, I don't know how you explain an enormous amount of human behavior. The market didn't even understand it. Most of the people trading equities, especially around earnings announcements, don't know what a data warehouse is or what matters in that market. All they saw was "miss".

I didn't say the CEO was wrong or that long-term thinking is bad! I said the actual incentives are still misaligned. (I mean, a lot of people do shirk at work, and it even works out well for them.)

I think you have a weird and probably not useful definition of "actual" if "monthly revenue" is not actual but "projected monthly revenue two years from now" is actual. (Or maybe I've just lived in Germany too long.)

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#165

Post by mejakethomas »

carlineng wrote: post #58

[Disclaimer: former Snowflake employee] Snowflake is not expensive because of perverse incentives, which is the primary claim of the article. It is expensive because it is a highly differentiated and very sticky product. As others have mentioned, competition is the ultimate incentive to work on performance. Every dollar of Snowflake revenue is a dollar of revenue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Databricks are figh…

This, 100%.

It eats/consolidates formerly-disparate costs around the org. Because it's so good.

Which makes it look expensive.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#166

Post by beoberha »

wpietri wrote: post #102
beoberha wrote: post #32

I disagree with the assertion that Snowflake has no incentive to improve performance. While I don’t work for Snowflake, I work for a competitor and we’re constantly looking to improve performance to make customers happy. For the exact reason that the article claims Snowflake wouldn’t innovate, I’d assert that they would. If they are expensive and slow, and a competitor is faster and cheaper, eventually they will see…

Could you say more about the relative market position of your two companies? I don't know the market at all, but Snowflake is certainly large and successful (IPOed in 2020, $50bn market cap). I could readily imagine that a company doing so well might not feel the incentive to improve very strongly. Or that they might see themselves more as a sales/marketing-led company than one where technical quality is a key driver…

You could probably google my username and find out, but I’ll say we’re bigger than Snowflake and are very much entrenched in the enterprise database market :)

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#167

Post by mejakethomas »

stassajin wrote: post #141

I'm the author of the article. Didn't expect it to blow up. Let me clarify a few points: 1. I like Snowflake and I think they brought several innovations to the field: Instant scale out/up, time-travel, unstructured data query support. 2. Snowflake obviously makes innovations and performance improvements, otherwise they would not be the market leader they are. But I'm also suspecting that they make just enough perfor…

Totally agree with Redshift sentiments. It's been lovely seeing BigQuery and Redshift step their game up over the past 1.5yrs, because they really should have been doing certain things for many years prior.

Re: Firebolt, I don't consider it to be in the same class as Snowflake whatsoever (even though their advertising seems to indicate otherwise). Snowflake is like a very powerful swiss army knife. Firebolt is good for a very specific (dare I say niche?) workload but falls all over itself for the vast majority of data org needs.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#168

Post by mejakethomas »

evtx wrote: post #156
shrimalpreeti wrote: post #101

[Disclaimer: I work for a company that offers a Snowflake Cost Optimizer product] We’re an open-source monitoring & alerting tool and many of our users were using it to set alerts on their warehousing (Snowflake) costs. The problem with Snowflake is particularly worse due to its lack of query level attribution of costs and no in-built features for monitoring or recommendations on improvements. We’re building a Snowfl…

In my experience Snowflake is very receptive to enhancement requests. If you feel Snowflake should be doing something better for surfacing optimizations, I'd ask them. That said, I'm not sure your comment is fully accurate: 1) "lack of query level attribution of costs" Snowflake doesn't charge per query so there can't be default query level attribution of cost. Snowflake charges by second of warehouse use. But you CA…

This. Snowflake introspection five years ago looks very, very different than today. Mostly due to enhancement requests.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#169

Post by mejakethomas »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #36

I have no Snowflake experience, but some limited BigQuery experience. And it's very easy for a small company to get to $100k/year bills without massive data.

Completely agree. Currently staring at 700k+ BigQuery costs annually and accomplished MUCH more with Snowflake at the same price.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#170

Post by discodave »

carlineng wrote: post #58

[Disclaimer: former Snowflake employee] Snowflake is not expensive because of perverse incentives, which is the primary claim of the article. It is expensive because it is a highly differentiated and very sticky product. As others have mentioned, competition is the ultimate incentive to work on performance. Every dollar of Snowflake revenue is a dollar of revenue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Databricks are figh…

> Every dollar of Snowflake revenue is a dollar of revenue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Databricks are fighting for.

This is true, but misses one detail...

Snowflake runs in the cloud so every dollar of Snowflake revenue is roughly $0.40^1 of Amazon/Google/Microsoft revenue anyway.

^1: Snowflakes gross margin is in the range of 50-60% https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SNOW/snowflake/gro...

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