Title: Throwaway to share a cautionary tale about contract chicanery with Snowflake to protect our ID. In mid-2019, I started testing DWH providers for our small data stack. Did the free trial for on demand Snowflake after hearing how it is suited for smaller use cases. After a few months of using it, we had bills in the low hundreds range&#x2F;month. Their sales rep reached out to sell us on a contract where we pre-purchase $10k credits on a yearly contract (their lowest contract at that point) where we can roll-over any un-used credits next year. I will emphasize here that the sales conversation, rep never mentioned anything regarding new purchases requirements with the roll over, and in fact portrayed it as a paperwork process to just continue the credits. The actual contract clause is pretty vague and just says unused capacity will roll over into the next contract.<p>Fast forward to now, we need to do our roll-over contract for our unused credits, which due to covid, we have over 90% unused credits because we had to prioritize other projects. Rep reaches out and informs us that we need to sign a new contract for $1k min. to roll-over our 9k credits and we would lose the 15% discount on the unused credits. Losing the discount is one thing, but having to purchase more just to keep what we have purchased was not at all how this roll-over process was portrayed at signing. The rep then said in fact there is a worse policy for newer customers where unused credits will only roll-over if you renew at the same price or greater only. I should count myself lucky that they had the decency to enforce this policy rather than their other arbitrary policy that is not mentioned anywhere.<p>If you are considering contracting with them and they are promising all these great things about discounts and roll-over, don&#x27;t do it. I guess since their IPO, they no longer care about their smaller customers. There has been some chatter on HN about how Snowflake is worth so much, well...here you go.
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