Title: Snowflake Cost Optimization: $1.3M in Cumulative Savings Tools: Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, SQL

# Problem A $2B SaaS unicorn’s Snowflake bill kept climbing as data volumes and dbt models grew. Spend was spread across CI runs, stale models, idle warehouses and storage nobody used, and no one owned it.

# What I did Ran Snowflake cost as a quarterly program: attributed spend to dbt models and workloads, ranked every fix by ROI, and shipped 25+ initiatives over 3 months.

- Retired a legacy data models: ~$240K/yr

- Trimmed CI test data: ~$190K/yr

- Removed expensive models with little or no usage: ~$180K/yr

- Cleaned up stale, backup and dev databases: ~$175K/yr

- Turned rarely queried tables into views: ~$145K/yr

- Moved heavy models to incremental loads and fixed clustering: up to 90% cheaper per model.

- Contract re-negotiation with Snowflake

- Other

# Result

- $1.3M in cumulative annual savings across 25+ initiatives

- Biggest single win ~$240K/yr; fastest win ~$65K/yr from a one-hour change