3 ms·

Snowflake's margins are like 90%+ on top of the compute they sell, and they pass on all these costs including egress directly to customers.

amluto 3y ago
Their list price for storage capacity is only on the order of 2x what S3 charges, and Snowflake and S3 likely both offer discounts. Comparing compute costs is harder. If I were running a service like Snowflake, I would certainly appreciate the effortless scaling that the major clouds offer. But I also know what I pay for actual servers and roughly what I would pay in a major cloud, and I much prefer the former.
- Eridrus 3y ago
  Yeah, storage is much more competitive, but there have been leaks on what hardware they run on, their margins are incredible, which makes sense since they are selling software, not hardware! Anyway, there is an explicit egress charge: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-data-transfer https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-...
- dalyons 3y ago
  tbf, snowflakes whole thing & what makes them "next gen" vs a traditional datawarehouse is that you dont may much for data at rest. You pay as little as possible for the "warehousing" part, and pay mostly/only for compute/querying.
  - pas 3y ago
    wait, you still pay your S3 storage bills, right? just with DataBricks. you don't pay when you don't use their software, cool. but then you pay for per core per second for the license in addition to running the VMs, right? sure S3-like storage is 'cheap', but if you want up-to-date data pipelines you'll end up running these things for many hours each day. and plus you pay for each bucket operation, and so on.
api 3y ago
“Let’s get rid of IT and stop using on prem software. Outsource it all to the cloud and SaaS. We’ll save so much money!” … said the entire world pretty much … This is hilarious. Now that nobody makes on prem software anymore and nobody knows how to do IT, it’s time to turn the screws. The prices are only going up. You can’t move your data because it’s all locked into proprietary silos and only readable by one app running in one place. I told you so. So did loads of others. Oh well.
infogulch 3y ago
That's not the point. The point is that if the customer and SAAS provider "happen to" be in the same cloud then nobody pays any egress costs, but if the provider operated out of their own datacenter then the customer would pay additional egress costs to AWS to export their data to the SAAS provider. Snowflake is a good example because by the nature of the business customers send them a lot of data. This not only makes the customer pay more, but it also makes their billing and cost accounting much more complicated and unpredictable.

amluto 3y ago

Their list price for storage capacity is only on the order of 2x what S3 charges, and Snowflake and S3 likely both offer discounts. Comparing compute costs is harder. If I were running a service like Snowflake, I would certainly appreciate the effortless scaling that the major clouds offer. But I also know what I pay for actual servers and roughly what I would pay in a major cloud, and I much prefer the former.

Eridrus 3y ago
Yeah, storage is much more competitive, but there have been leaks on what hardware they run on, their margins are incredible, which makes sense since they are selling software, not hardware! Anyway, there is an explicit egress charge: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-data-transfer https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-...
dalyons 3y ago
tbf, snowflakes whole thing & what makes them "next gen" vs a traditional datawarehouse is that you dont may much for data at rest. You pay as little as possible for the "warehousing" part, and pay mostly/only for compute/querying.
- pas 3y ago
  wait, you still pay your S3 storage bills, right? just with DataBricks. you don't pay when you don't use their software, cool. but then you pay for per core per second for the license in addition to running the VMs, right? sure S3-like storage is 'cheap', but if you want up-to-date data pipelines you'll end up running these things for many hours each day. and plus you pay for each bucket operation, and so on.

api 3y ago

“Let’s get rid of IT and stop using on prem software. Outsource it all to the cloud and SaaS. We’ll save so much money!” … said the entire world pretty much … This is hilarious. Now that nobody makes on prem software anymore and nobody knows how to do IT, it’s time to turn the screws. The prices are only going up. You can’t move your data because it’s all locked into proprietary silos and only readable by one app running in one place. I told you so. So did loads of others. Oh well.

infogulch 3y ago

That's not the point. The point is that if the customer and SAAS provider "happen to" be in the same cloud then nobody pays any egress costs, but if the provider operated out of their own datacenter then the customer would pay additional egress costs to AWS to export their data to the SAAS provider. Snowflake is a good example because by the nature of the business customers send them a lot of data. This not only makes the customer pay more, but it also makes their billing and cost accounting much more complicated and unpredictable.