Yeah, storage is much more competitive, but there have been leaks on what hardware they run on, their margins are incredible, which makes sense since they are selling software, not hardware!
Anyway, there is an explicit egress charge: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cost-understanding-...
tbf, snowflakes whole thing & what makes them "next gen" vs a traditional datawarehouse is that you dont may much for data at rest. You pay as little as possible for the "warehousing" part, and pay mostly/only for compute/querying.
wait, you still pay your S3 storage bills, right?
just with DataBricks. you don't pay when you don't use their software, cool. but then you pay for per core per second for the license in addition to running the VMs, right?
sure S3-like storage is 'cheap', but if you want up-to-date data pipelines you'll end up running these things for many hours each day. and plus you pay for each bucket operation, and so on.
If I were running a service like Snowflake, I would certainly appreciate the effortless scaling that the major clouds offer. But I also know what I pay for actual servers and roughly what I would pay in a major cloud, and I much prefer the former.