Everytime you want to query your data, you need to pay the compute cost.

If instead you can write to something like Parquet/Iceberg, you're not paying for access your data.

Snowflake is great at aggregations and other stuff (seriously, huge fan of snowflakes SQL capabilities), but let's say you have a visualisation tool, you're paying for pulling data out .

Instead, writing data to something like S3, you instead can hookup your tools to this.

It's expensive to pull data out of Snowflake otherwise.

You people can’t be serious, right?

Ok so I build my data lake on s3 using all open tech. I’m still paying for S3 for puts and reads and lists.

Ok I put it on my own hardware. In my own colo. you’re still paying electricity and other things. Everything is lock in.

On top of that you’re beholden to an entire community of people and volunteers to make your tech work. Need a feature? Sponsor it. Or write it and fight to upstream it. On top of that if you do this at scale at a company what about the highly paid team of engineers you have to have to maintain all this?

With snowflake I alone could provide an entire production ready bi stack to a company. And I can do so and sleep well at night knowing it’s managed and taken care of and if it fails entire teams of people are working to fix it.

Are you going to build your own roads, your own power grid, your own police force?

Again my point remains. The vast majority of times people build on a vendor as a partner and then go on to build useful things.

Apple using cloud vendors for iCloud storage. You think they couldn’t do it themselves? They couldn’t find and pay and support all the tech their own? Of course they could. But they have better things to do than to reinvent the wheel I.e building value on top of dumb compute and that’s iCloud.