Snowflake

Snowflake is a managed data platform for analytics: you load data from your app, product events and other sources into one place and query it with SQL, without running any servers. It runs in the AWS, Azure or Google Cloud region you choose when you create the account.

The model to understand: storage and compute are billed apart. Data sits in compressed storage charged per terabyte per month, and queries run on virtual warehouses, compute clusters you size from X-Small up. A running warehouse consumes credits per second, with a one-minute minimum each time it starts, and nothing while suspended; by default warehouses suspend when idle and resume when a query arrives. The dollar price of a credit depends on the edition and region.

For a small team: one place to join app, billing and analytics data in SQL, drivers for Python, Node.js, Go, JDBC, ODBC and .NET, data sharing with other Snowflake accounts, and Snowflake Postgres, which runs a Postgres instance on a dedicated VM next to your warehouse data.

Limits: there is no ongoing free tier, only a 30-day trial. Costs follow how long warehouses run and how large they are, so a warehouse left running or sized too big is the usual surprise. It is a commercial, cloud-only service with no self-hosted option, and Enterprise features such as multi-cluster warehouses and longer Time Travel cost more per credit.