The Cold Truth About Snowflake DB

April 16, 2025

Data Warehouses: Cold Storage, Hot Costs—A Warm Alternative

Conversations at the recent SIIA’s Business Information Media Summit (BIMS) revealed a chilling reality: for many publishers and media companies, the promise of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake DB is proving to be a major hurdle. The complexities and costs associated with deployment, coupled with the necessity of expensive BI tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI to extract value, are not only hindering implementation but actively stifling growth.

This article exposes the hidden drawbacks that publishers should carefully consider before investing.

Cost Management:

Snowflake’s consumption-based pricing model, while flexible, can lead to unpredictable costs. Heavy workloads or inefficient query optimization can result in significant expenses.
Understanding and accurately predicting Snowflake costs can be complex, requiring careful monitoring and management.
As an industry trend, many organizations that moved to cloud-based platforms are now repatriating their applications to owned hardware as a way to get a handle on costs.

Vendor Lock-in:

Snowflake’s proprietary architecture and deep integration with cloud providers can create vendor lock-in. Migrating to another platform may be challenging and costly.

Steep Learning Curve:

While basic Snowflake functionality is relatively easy to learn, mastering advanced features like semi-structured data handling and complex data sharing requires specialized knowledge. Not all publishers have in-house data and engineering teams required to deploy and manage as data sets continually change.

Cloud-Only Dependency:

Snowflake is a cloud-native solution, which means it relies entirely on cloud infrastructure. This can be a limitation for organizations with on-premises data centers or those seeking hybrid solutions.
Dependence on the cloud providers infrastructure. If the cloud provider has issues, then those issues will effect your snowflake usage.

Pricing Complexity:

Snowflake’s pricing has many facets, including storage, compute, and data transfer. This can make it difficult to accurately forecast costs, especially for multi-faceted publishers with variable workloads.

Staffing Issues:

Snowflake’s integrations require a team of developers to implement and operate on an ongoing basis. Organizations without in-house development talent will be hard-pressed to find value in Snowflake without investing in specialized engineers.

The ONEcount Alternative

ONEcount’s CDP connects all your data sources into a scalable, private cloud-based data warehouse and includes a robust, integrated BI suite. Here are the key benefits having an integrated solution.

Enhanced Data Insights: ONEcount BI takes all your data sets across web, content, email, banners, transactions, events, social, etc into meaningful visualizations and reports.

Improved Decision-Making: Visual representations of data make it easier for all teams to instantly identify trends, patterns, and anomalies. Creating new products, sponsored programs is a key advantage.
Increased Efficiency: ONEcount BI automates reporting and analysis, saving time and resources. Eliminating manual exports, pouring thru separate spreadsheets is a thing of the past.
Self-Service Analytics: We expose the full data layer across all touchpoints which empowers any team member to ability to explore data and curate their own reports without relying on IT or data analysts.
No increase in staffing: ONEcount’s solutions are direct-to-marketer tools that do not require integration or development talent do deploy.

ONEcout is an integrated solution that combines a scalable, private cloud-based data warehouse with a robust, built-in BI suite can effectively address these issues.

By providing enhanced data insights, improved decision-making, increased efficiency through automation, and self-service analytics, ONEcount empowers teams to leverage their data without the complexities and costs associated with separate, disparate systems. This integrated approach offers a more streamlined and cost-effective path for publishers to harness the power of their data and drive business success.

For more information on ONEcount, contact Joanne Persico at 203-665.6211 x204 or email: joanne@one-count.com.