Important to keep in mind sales expense often buys multi-year cashflows.
In this case, directly comparing the expense of building a customer base to the revenue from the existing customer base over the same period can lead you to wrong conclusions about the viability of the business.
I would focus instead on the cost of customer acquisition, versus the PV of the average customer's gross cash flows.
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----------------- Lazy Analysis -----------------
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Here is SNOW's latest Q: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1640147/0001...
If you look on page 32 we see that the weighted average life of large customer contracts is 1.8 years, and that net revenue retention rate is 169%!
So customers sign up for multiple years, and renew with big purchases.
Turning to the K for some annual figures: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1640147/0001...
----------------- Assumptions -----------------
Let's model SNOW's revenue as: The sum of prior year's revenue (existing contracts) plus new revenue cause by the prior year's sales efforts.
On page 42 of the K: We see that each year's gross income is consistently larger than the prior year's sales and marketing expense.
----------------- Example -----------------
In 2020, if we say that all 164mm of new revenue is due to the 125mm of sales expense in 2019, and contracts average 2 years, then we have ~320mm of revenue on 125mm of expense.
By this math in 2021 and forward, it looks like we can expect ~840mm of new revenue from the 293mm of sales expense in 2020, and in 2022 we might expect 1,100mm of total revenue.
----------------- Projections -----------------
In reality, SNOW has projected $1,020 in revenue for 2022. - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/26/snowflake-snow-earnings-q1-2...
Note my number is a little high as I did not know what portion of 2019's contracts expired in 2019, so assumed none.