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.