Why is Snowflake so expensive
I&#x27;m the author of the article. Didn&#x27;t expect it to blow up. Let me clarify a few points:<p>1. I like Snowflake and I think they brought several innovations to the field: Instant scale out&#x2F;up, time-travel, unstructured data query support. 
2. Snowflake obviously makes innovations and performance improvements, otherwise they would not be the market leader they are. But I&#x27;m also suspecting that they make just enough performance improvements to be at par and then use the vendor lock in features to make switching hard.<p>My argument is that their rate of performance innovation has considerably gone down and DataBricks, Firebolt, and open source alternatives just seem more attractive from a cost&#x2F;performance ratio. I agree that Snowflake is still the best data-warehouse to start with if you have 100k, but not if you truly plan for a multi-year horizon and your usage expands.<p>- Redshift also brought a lot of innovation that allowed people to execute analytical queries 100x-1000x faster than any OLTP that existed out there. I&#x27;ve used Redshift for four years and they kept ignoring performance and features until Snowflake came out. All of a sudden because of competitor pressure, they put more effort into the product to maintain and gain market share. My hope is that Snowflake finds a solution to their innovator&#x27;s dilemma, since competitors are hot on their tails.<p>- Some people point out that 70% usage growth just shows that Snowflake is useful. Nobody disagrees with that. The issue is that majority of the companies don&#x27;t experience a 70% revenue growth to catch up with the growth in costs. At some point, you have to clamp down on costs, which means that you have to look for alternatives to run things more efficiently.