Snowflake is basically GCP BigQuery or AWS Athena, but they charge $40/TB of (highly compressed) storage and have a decent margin on compute too. It's also completely proprietary, so you're not exiting their platform anytime soon. The other big player in this space is DataBricks, which is a reasonable product, but their pricing is based on both instance type and volume of data consumed by a query, which can get pretty insane quickly when dealing with large amounts. Again, they rely on lock-in to a significant extent.
Snowflake employee here, speaking on my own behalf.
It's no harder to get out of Snowflake than it is to get out of any other SQL based RDBMS. If we were relying on the fact that we manage the files in S3 instead of the customer to keep our customers on board, we wouldn't have a business.
I will grant that there's non-ANSI features in Snowflake that our competition don't offer, but it would be weird to describe "have awesome features" as being lock-in.
They are doubling revenue every X months (currently about 12). And it's a big market and getting bigger, so they might be able to keep X pretty low for a pretty long time. They are adding customers + adding revenue at existing customers. Double revenue every 12 months and you get to 32x in 5 years. And it's pretty sticky.
Yup, it's interesting stuff. The efficiency claims (ie for customers) seems believable (like maybe 70% true?) so it will be interesting to see where those growth numbers go from here... up/down/sideways, it all seems very possible