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Why is Snowflake so expensive

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Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#21

Post by soheil »

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…

If that lowers the barrier to entry without having expert level knowledge to know what a full table scan even means why not? Instead of hiring a dba maybe you could hire an intern instead and happily eat the cost of Snowflake.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#23

Post by toto444 »

The competition is tough in the data warehousing industry, if Snowflake is expensive people will know. Current customers may not leave but it's going to be harder for them to get new customers.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#24

Post by Foobar8568 »

veeti wrote: post #20
jwie wrote: post #2

You would think they would be saving (and charging the customer!) a bundle not enforcing constraints on their tables. I’d be very interested to hear the Snowflake side of this decision, but to the customer it’s simply unforgivable to have cosmetic constraints on a database.

Do you really need functional constraints in a OLAP database? Surely such validations already exist wherever your data is coming from.

Ohohoh yeah sure, you mean application based constraints? Or an Entity–attribute–value base application ? What about documents?

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#25

Post by nojito »

jeffwask wrote: post #16
benjaminwootton wrote: post #6

The monthly bill does make me wince, but Snowflake of course includes all server and compute costs, no installation, initial configuration or upgrades etc. It’s genuine SaaS. It’s also very simple to manage and optimise so less DBA or DevOps type manpower. Then of course you can perfectly right size your instances and pay by the second for compute and by the byte for storage. Expensive, but lower TCO than alternate a…

Yeah...100%. It's expensive til you try running a data warehouse yourself and have to hire in to support it. Like any other service there are scale points where it no longer makes sense but for most smaller orgs it's still a bargain over DIY

We did a cost analysis and found databricks and BQ to be cheaper than a similar snowflake build out.

I think people are falling into a trap of not considering costs because “it takes care of everything”.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#27

Post by ramesh31 »

nemothekid wrote: post #17
ramesh31 wrote: post #14

I'm of the mind that Snowflake and Databricks are losing their value prop now that Delta Lake is open source and Iceberg is maturing. What's to stop me from rolling my own Spark clusters and just using one of those? Is anyone doing this?

> What's to stop me from rolling my own Spark clusters and just using one of those? Is anyone doing this? 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…

>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.

I think as an end user I would absolutely agree on this point. But many companies use Databricks as part of their automated backend systems that they resell to customers. The cost per "DBU" unit is astronomical for the amount of raw compute in use. It feels a bit like running a restaurant where you serve takeout.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#28

Post by Aulig »

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…

It feels like these companies haven't found the right value metric to price along. Ideally it should align with the value the customer receives.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#29

Post by awinder »

I think the main metric that this is built on may be too coarse to derive the meaning that the article is. There’s conjecture that what’s driving this is more querying over the same dataset (more streamlit dashboards) but it could just as easily be expanding usage inside of companies. That’s what’s going on at my company right now, more teams using snowflake, more data being pushed in to replace existing workflows, etc.

I’m also not sure I understand the dig at streamlit dashboards. If you’re running hardware and introduce new read workflows, eventually you’ll need more read replicas and you’ll pay more for it. Maybe you can argue that snowflake is doing this at a higher cost but the metric data is not available in the sources to make that claim.

Re: Why is Snowflake so expensive

#30

Post by nojito »

nemothekid wrote: post #17
ramesh31 wrote: post #14

I'm of the mind that Snowflake and Databricks are losing their value prop now that Delta Lake is open source and Iceberg is maturing. What's to stop me from rolling my own Spark clusters and just using one of those? Is anyone doing this?

> What's to stop me from rolling my own Spark clusters and just using one of those? Is anyone doing this? 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…

I can spin up and down 100+ node clusters on the 4 largest cloud providers at will.

What ops am I missing?

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