> You are missing the "we could pay someone that provides a commodified, open-source alternative to Snowflake" option. Which services provider do you have in m

> You are missing the "we could pay someone that provides a commodified, open-source alternative to Snowflake" option. Which services provider do you have in mind to pay? The advantage of Snowflake is that the CIO can pick Snowflake as the default for the entire org and it will work across a very large number of business use cases. I don't see any open source analytic software that can do that. In my experience open source analytic solutions work much better for specific use cases, say network flow log analysis. You pick exactly the right set of components for that use case and build specifically to the problem. Maybe you use ClickHouse + Kafka--cheaper, simpler, faster. But when you shift to another problem, such as analyzing support case patterns, that requires unpredictable joins on large numbers of tables the first solution does not work at all. Now you need something like Presto on data lakes, which is completely different technology. The alternative is to move all the data in to Snowflake and do both of the above use cases there. Sure, it's not the fastest or the cheapest software but the savings in labor more than make up for the licensing cost. A lot of companies make that decision.