SourceMedium vs Snowflake

Why teams choose SourceMedium over Snowflake

Snowflake is a data warehouse. It stores and queries data — nothing else. No data loading, no transformation, no dashboards, no attribution, no analytics. To get ecommerce insights from Snowflake, you need to buy, build, and maintain at least five more tools plus hire an engineer to wire them together. SourceMedium replaces that entire assembly with one product, one bill.

The typical Snowflake-based ecommerce stack costs $16K–$38K/month in tooling and labor, plus 6–12 months before the first useful insight.

Where the approaches differ

A warehouse vs a data platform: Snowflake gives you storage and compute. SourceMedium provides the complete infrastructure Snowflake requires—connectors, transformation, dashboards, attribution, and AI—as a single integrated service. Pre-built data models and 2,500+ automated quality checks mean your team gets ecommerce insights from day one, not after months of assembly.

Credit-based pricing vs predictable costs: Snowflake's credit-based pricing means your bill scales with every query, every dashboard refresh, every seasonal spike. The 60-second minimum billing per warehouse resume means a 3-second BI query gets billed for a full minute — inflating costs by up to 20x per query. An entire cottage industry of cost optimization tools (Select, Keebo, ChaosGenius) exists because Snowflake cost management is so complex. SourceMedium's pricing is predictable — no credits to monitor, no warehouse sizing decisions. Generous base compute included, with simple usage-based pricing for heavy BigQuery or AI workloads.

Dedicated support, not a ticket queue: Every SourceMedium customer gets a named Customer Solutions Analyst — US-based, with hands-on DTC experience across marketing, ops, finance, and executive teams. Solution hours are included in your plan, scoped during the sales process so the highest-value work fits within what's already budgeted. No offshore support teams, no $250/hr professional services surprises, no "implementation packages" as a separate line item. If you need additional hours, pricing is transparent — and you always have the option to resource work with your own team instead.

What you still need to buy: Snowflake alone costs $3K–$8K/month. Then add Fivetran for data loading ($1.5K–$3K/mo), dbt for transformation ($100–$500/mo), Looker or Tableau for dashboards ($3K–$10K/mo), reverse ETL for activating data ($500–$1.5K/mo), and at least a half-time data engineer ($8K–$15K/mo). Total: $16K–$38K/month — before you've built a single ecommerce metric.

Why SourceMedium chose BigQuery

We built on BigQuery for specific reasons that matter to ecommerce brands. Its serverless model eliminates warehouse sizing and credit monitoring entirely — no virtual warehouses to tune, no idle compute charges. Storage is cheaper with automatic cold-tier pricing. Native GA4 and Google Ads data transfers are free, saving the Fivetran connector cost for two of your largest data sources. And native Looker Studio integration means your reporting layer connects without a separate BI license.

No ecommerce-specific anything: Snowflake has no attribution, no LTV calculations, no cohort analysis, no customer segmentation, no product analytics. Its Retail & CPG resources page targets large enterprise retailers — not DTC brands. Non-technical ecommerce teams cannot use Snowflake directly.

The ownership stress test: With Snowflake, you own the warehouse — but everything built on top (the dbt models, Looker dashboards, custom metrics, orchestration) is fragile and depends on the engineer who built it. Leave SourceMedium, and your BigQuery warehouse, dashboards, and SQL keep working — because the foundation was designed to be portable from day one.

AI built for ecommerce, not general-purpose LLMs: Snowflake's Cortex AI is a general-purpose LLM layer — powerful, but not an ecommerce analyst. SourceMedium's AI Analyst is purpose-built: ask about attribution, LTV, cohort retention, or contribution margin in Slack and get an answer with the SQL behind it, ready to verify in BigQuery.

When Snowflake might be the better fit

Snowflake works for organizations with dedicated data engineering teams that need a general-purpose analytical warehouse for enterprise-wide workloads — multi-department data sharing, data clean rooms, or use cases requiring Snowflake's unique features like Snowpark or data marketplace. If ecommerce is a minor component of a much larger enterprise data infrastructure, Snowflake may belong in your stack. Many SourceMedium customers use BigQuery for ecommerce analytics alongside other warehouses for non-ecommerce workloads — so it's not always either/or.