Why Your $250k Data Warehouse Bill Is So High (and How to Fix It)

Why Is My Snowflake Bill So High?

Executives blame query inefficiency. Data teams scramble to tune jobs, resize clusters, and optimize pipelines.

And yet…the bill keeps climbing.

The truth: your data warehouse bill is a governance failure, not a technical failure.

Most mid-size companies overspend 30–50% on Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks because:

• 70–80% of dashboards aren’t used.

• Pipelines feed abandoned reports.

• Metrics are duplicated across teams.

• Nobody owns definitions like “revenue” or “pipeline.”

Until governance fixes the root cause, you’re just paying to process chaos.

The 4-Step Playbook to Cut Data Warehouse Costs

1. Inventory What’s Actually Used

Run a 30-day usage audit.

• Which tables/dashboards are hit weekly?

• Which haven’t been touched in months?

• How much compute is tied to “dead” assets?

Most firms discover 60–80% of spend powers reports no one opens.

2. Assign KPI Ownership

Every metric must have one clear owner. Not “data team.” Not “shared.” One name.

Ownership stops duplicate pipelines, duplicate storage, and duplicate costs.

Check our data strategy roadmap

3. Purge What Doesn’t Drive Outcomes

Ask: what decision does this dataset support?

If no exec can answer → delete.

If a dashboard doesn’t map to a KPI on the business scorecard → archive.

4. Strategy & Governance Guardrails

Cleanup without governance = Groundhog Day. The waste creeps back.

Put in place:

• Roadmap tied to KPIs → no build without a business outcome.

• Lightweight documentation → owner, purpose, linked KPI (2 sentences max).

• Quarterly reviews → kill unused assets every 90 days.

• Guardrails for new builds → Who owns it? What decision will it support? ROI?

This is how cost savings stick and how trust in data grows.

Check our data governance framework

Cost Breakdown: Where the Money Goes

Beyond Cost: Why This Matters

Cutting 40% off your Snowflake bill is the quick win.

But the real ROI is bigger:

• Executives trust a single version of the truth.

• Teams stop duplicating effort.

• Your company becomes AI-ready because data is governed, clean, and owned.

Query tuning saves thousands.

Governance saves millions.

-> Schedule our data strategy assessment to understand your current status and how to levrage data to it's fullest