[sciurus]

Your complaint is that they require you to purchase a new annual contract after your first one ends? This really shouldn't come as a surprise.

And they'll let you roll over $9000 worth of unused credits by purchasing just $1000 new ones? This actually sounds like a pretty good deal.

I think your problem is that you purchased more than you needed via a contract you didn't understand.

[ziftface]

It's disingenuous for the company to try to get you into a contract by promising that your "credits" can be rolled over without being up-front about the conditions.

Obviously OP made a mistake here, and it seems that they're admitting that, but if what they said was true, this company was being deceptive about the contract.

[tylersmith]

Do rollovers of credits, minutes, etc typically persist after the subscription has ended? If I cancel my AT&T account I can't keep using my saved up rollover minutes.

[nouveaux]

I'm not sure this is a good comparison. If you cancel your AT&T account, the assumption here is that you're getting rid of your number. At that point, you are not retaining service.

Based on their website[1], you can have an account with pay as you go. There is no reason to assume that if I change to a month to month agreement, I would have to create a new account. Why shouldn't the rollover minutes stay with the account? OP paid for it already.

To go back to the AT&T analogy, if they offered a prepaid yearly contract with rollover minutes, and I lose those minutes because I switched to month to month, I would be pretty angry.

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

[throwawaysflake]

We did expect to use more but covid changed that, that said, the problem I am warning others about is the the sales conversation was not accurate, but none of what was promised was in the contract in writing. Definitely my fault though for trusting that the roll over process is as simple as issuing new paperwork as portrayed by a guy who is just looking to close the deal. I have not had such a problem with other companies in the same sector with such sales practices but maybe that's just my experience. Makes no sense to me though coz who would want to sign a contract when you don't know what policies they might decide on mid-way, the discount offered is tiny (unlike AWS reserved where it is super clear when they expire but you also get a huge discount so it's not vague what the trade-offs are) and you are much better off on demand.

[biggestdummy]

I'm confused. What are you are asking for them to do?

You pre-paid for $10k of usage, with an agreement to roll-over unused credits into next year's contract. The plain definition of roll-over includes the fact that you'd have an active future account. Otherwise, they'd just say "prepay credits never expire". Imagine trying to use roll-over minutes on a phone plan where you cancelled the phone.

$1k/yr seems like a very low minimum which will serve as basis to roll your $9k of existing credits into.

Sounds to me like you just didn't think about or budget for this. Doesn't sound like any misrepresentation to me.

[throwawaysflake]

The budget changed due to covid, we definitely anticipated using more than 10% in a year. Even at normal usage, we discussed with the rep that we could not finish in 1 year so what the point of a contract and he said it was easy to roll over and they will just issue new paperwork. That it would be with min. purchase was the condition that I think he should have disclosed but that's my issue for not pushing harder. That said, these new purchase min may be new policy after we signed because there seems to be newer policies that require even bigger purchases, which may or may not be disclosed at sales time/in their contracts.

My post is definitely a lesson learned and shared to others who are small and may be interested in getting better engineering support from Snowflake (a benefit of signing up that was the main reason for us that we ended up not needing) by the contract route to question their sales rep in depth and get it in the contract itself, and honestly, should just stay on demand.