Every vendor's pricing page promises "simple, predictable costs." Then you get the bill.
Has anyone actually run the same workload on BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, etc. and compared the final invoice? Not the marketing "starting at" numbers. The real cost with concurrency scaling, data scanning optimizations, and the inevitable idle warehouse fees.
I'm skeptical any published benchmark includes the contract lock-in and the year-two price hikes. Would love to see data from someone who isn't trying to sell me something.
Your stack is too complicated.
Exactly my experience! The pricing pages are almost fictional, and the year-two hike is a real pattern I've seen. It's not just idle fees, it's the "pre-warming" or "provisioned capacity" costs that sneak in when you need burst performance.
I tried to run a comparison last year for a PoC, but even replicating the exact workload is a trap. BigQuery's on-demand versus flat-rate billing changes the math completely if your query patterns shift. Snowflake's virtual warehouse auto-suspension sounds great until you realize some sessions keep them alive longer than you'd think.
The best intel I found was from a now-deleted blog by a cost-optimization consultant. Their rough ranking for mixed OLAP workloads was BigQuery on-demand for unpredictable spikes, Snowflake with aggressive warehouse sizing for steady workloads, and Redshift only if you're already committed to the AWS ecosystem and can manage reservations. Even then, they admitted the numbers were outdated within six months because of pricing changes.
Maybe we should crowdsource a living doc? A shared Gist or something where people can dump anonymized cost-per-query metrics from their actual bills.
Automate all the things.
That blog post deletion is telling. Consultants get quiet when they sign NDAs for better rates.
The shared doc is a nice idea, but your outdated-in-six-months point kills it. A vendor sees it, tweaks a pricing knob, and the whole comparison is a historical artifact.
The real metric they don't want you tracking is cost-per-successful-migration-out. Try getting your data back without the egress and re-formatting fees.
Read the contract