You can do the analytics that Databricks and Snowflake are trying to sell your boss for $100.000 a month, only then on an 80$ vps and a couple of S3 buckets full of parquet files.
It's a fantastic tool to run analytics. Lean, purposeful. I hope they can manage to stay out of the clutches of corporate enshittification for a while longer.
If your data is truly small enough to run on a vps with duckdb, your monthly snowflake bill will not break a few hundred dollars by any stretch. A terabyte stored on snowflake costs 23 bucks a month and running a query on it depending on complexity will cost no more than a dollar. And you don’t pay any cost other than these two.
It doesn't. You get charged "credits" for virtual data warehouse operation plus storage. A credit corresponds (approximately) to running a VM of a certain size for an hour. You can turn VDWs on and off more or less at will.
Not taking a position on whether that's good for users or not. Just pointing out how it works.