[programbreeding]

I don't have any experience with them but I went to the pricing section on their website[0] and was greeted with very large all-caps text:

PRICING: WHY PAY FOR WHAT YOU DON’T USE?

PAY FOR THE COMPUTE AND STORAGE YOU ACTUALLY USE.

I found that pretty funny given the problem you're running in to.

[0] https://www.snowflake.com/pricing/

[altdatathrow]

You only pay for what you use, but you must purchase their virtual currency Snowbux, at least 10,000 units per year.

[tiffanyh]

Their marketing copy is still accurate.

It sounds like the OP wanted to get 15% discount, which required them to prepay for 10,000 usage credits that expire after a year.

It's not Snowflake fault if you didn't use the prepaid amount that allowed OP to gain the 15% discount.

Only prepay for things you know you'll entirely use

[throwawaysflake]

We knew we weren't going to use the entire prepaid amount and said to the sales rep we didn't think it was worth doing it because our usage was low and we would have amounts left over and the rep insisted the roll-over process would be perfect for our use case (he can see our prior months of on demand) and said literally it is just paperwork (I guess that is technically true, paperwork is involved, so lesson learned!). That said, from what he wrote it seems these "policies" may be new to 2020 because he told me that even newer customers have the renew at the original contract amount or more to roll-over so maybe it was easy paperwork any roll-over back in 2019 when we signed and that has since changed. The contract is so vague that it only protects them, not the customer, if they decide on changing their internal policies. Obviously, if they just stated the policy, we wouldn't have signed any contracts.

We purchase because without contract, you can't access their support engineer which we thought we would need but turned out not needed at all (also, I am starting to doubt if the support engineer part is even true, you can probably submit a ticket anyway).15% is not a significant enough saving to sacrifice the flexibility, given AWS can offer like 75% off at reserve. I wrote this post so others who may be considering it should know their rep may not be transparent about everything or might not be able to live up to their promises. I feel like for their long term, this is counter productive for their business strategy, shrug.

[throwawaysflake]

Only if you stay on demand, which is why I say, use Snowflake if it works for you (not knocking the product), just stay on demand.

Edit to add that for those who don't believe the sales process was as misleading as I portrayed, just look at their investor earnings release from today! They really try to paint a picture that it is trivial to rollover your credits beyond your contract term and you wouldn't be anything you don't want to buy/need/use. I mean gotta laugh considering their newest policy is you have to buy new contracts at the same or greater price point as last year to rollover.

"Product revenue is a key metric for us because we recognize revenue based on platform consumption, which is inherently variable at our customers’ discretion, and not based on the amount and duration of contract terms. Product revenue includes compute, storage, and data transfer resources, which are consumed by customers on our platform as a single, integrated offering. Customers have the flexibility to consume more than their contracted capacity during the contract term and may have the ability to roll over unused capacity to future periods, generally on the purchase of additional capacity at renewal. Our consumption-based business model distinguishes us from subscription-based software companies that generally recognize revenue ratably over the contract term and may not permit rollover. Because customers have flexibility in the timing of their consumption, which can exceed their contracted capacity or extend beyond the original contract term in many cases, the amount of product revenue recognized in a given period is an important indicator of customer satisfaction and the value derived from our platform. Product revenue excludes our professional services and other revenue"

https://investors.snowflake.com/news/news-details/2020/Snowf...

[throwawaysflake]

OP here, for some of the common themes/FAQs, because I am going to hop off but the original post doesn't have enough character space for me to be clear. 1. No, we obviously did not know the min. sales conditions to issue new contract after the year and the rep never mentioned this even though we explicitly discussed that we could not finish the contracted amount even at our pre-covid usage. The rep portrayed the roll-over process as simply issuing new paperwork. Had he said this is done with min. sales conditions, we would not have signed. I looked up what they have written publicly about their own roll over policy and I can only found this on their SEC filing "Customers have the flexibility to consume more than their contracted capacity during the contract term and may have the ability to roll over unused capacity to future periods, generally on the purchase of additional capacity at renewal".

What I want to point out is that the last clause does imply that some people at some point could roll over without purchasing additional capacity, so it may be that the policy of min. new purchase was made after we signed, or the rep didn't disclose the policy, or whatever. All this is to say their whole roll over policy is obviously in flux so you are at their whim even if it sounds great. The rep (I guess to convince me that the min. policy is not that bad) said newer customer are in a different bucket where their roll over can only occur by signing another purchase at the same price or higher (so if we signed later, we would have to pay 10K more to retain the 9k and so on). Hopefully these newer customers were told this or were savvier than me and got it in writing in their contracts. If you are interested in the exact text of the contract where roll over was mentioned, I posted it in a reply somewhere.

2. We signed a contract for a few reasons and the discount wasn't even the main one. We always prefer the flexibility but Snowflake promises engineering support only for those on contract, though we ended up not even needing this as we solved problems that came up ourselves and the product is pretty self explanatory. Again why I say go on demand. The discount offered for contracts is really small, much smaller than AWS for example where it's like 70% off for 3 years etc. AWS is super clear that those expire in 3 years but the discount is huge to make up for it. In Snowflake's case, I don't see the upside since roll-over is really a pain and the discount is tiny. I don't have any experience with the support to say whether having a contract is worth it for this reason, but I suspect you can probably go through generic support or solve your own issues without too many problems.

3. I have no problems so far with Snowflake as a product by itself which is why I still say if you want to use it, I just recommend doing it on demand. Especially because a lot of smaller orgs are probably drawn to their positioning of being more flexible and only pay for what you use computing, they clearly are trying to figure out how to maximize their top line and changing policies around so you are probably better off on demand.