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I know nothing of Snowflake pricing, but how big is their infrastructure that leaving it on for an extended amount of time could see that much savings?

To put it another way, to rack up $500k spend for 30 days of constant provisioned time:

$500k/(30*24) = $694/hour

Presumably, with the 10 minute blocks, there was idle time where the spend was zero, so the instantaneous amount would be higher.

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He said a few thousand queries per week, which is maybe 3000, or 156k/year. That's 1.56 million cluster minutes, or $500k/1.56M = $.32/minute. A single snowflake node is $.05/minute, so maybe it's an 8-node cluster. They could shrink the node count down to 4 or 2 to save more money.

$58 per hour over a year on average. Sounds like a big big warehouse. For scalability.

This is approximately right. They also almost have one warehouse per two data engineers. I've been told there's a reason and usage analysis has been done by actually smart people, but it just sounds incredibly suspicious to me.

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