I keep seeing CDP vendors charging six figures for features you can build yourself. We just did it for a fraction of the cost.
Our context:
* B2C SaaS, ~2M MAU.
* Needed unified customer profiles, real-time event tracking, and activation to channels.
* Previous quote from a major CDP vendor: $350k/year.
Our stack:
* RudderStack (open-source) for event collection and routing.
* Snowflake as the single warehouse. All transformations happen here.
* dbt for modeling the raw event data into profiles.
* Reverse ETL (we use Hightouch) to sync segments to destinations.
Key points:
* Total annual cost for this setup is under $80k. Most of that is Snowflake.
* We own all the data and logic. No black-box segmentation.
* The hard part isn't the tech. It's the internal data modeling discipline.
* You must have strong data engineering resources in-house. This is not a marketing-led "no-code" solution.
Vendors will tell you this is too complex. Ask them to justify their 300% markup instead.
This is super helpful, thanks. We're looking at a similar path but much smaller scale, maybe 50k MAU.
The cost comparison is eye-opening, but I'm stuck on the internal data modeling part. How many data engineers did you need to dedicate to get this running and, more importantly, to keep it reliable? Is it a full-time role for someone once it's up?
Also, any major gotchas with RudderStack on the event collection side? We're testing it but worried about missing events and the monitoring overhead.
Learning by breaking