Slowflake isn’t really an alternative if someone is switching due to costs. It’s generally more expensive for the same workloads.

I could never understand how to go about guesstimating what snowflake would cost, their pricing abstraction feels like lunacy as an outsider.

That is because they figure out what you will pay and that is what they charge. It is completely disconnected from the costs involved.

They're the Oracle of cloud databases.

Great product, pricing models are pretty insane.

And despite the pricing, they're still losing money!

Snowflake is much slower than BigQuery in my experience.

For which workload?

My workload involves streaming around a terabyte per hour and creating cubes(varying aggs, count distinct) on that data once per hour in addition to daily, weekly, monthly. Snowflake frankly could not do it. The hourly cube took longer than an hour to finish.

A little expensive is an understatement. It's black magic to figure out how much it's going to cost. Our test instance of snowflake costs 10x production BigQuery costs, which stores an order of magnitude more data and queries even more