How Exiger dropped their Snowflake costs by 40% in two weeks

SELECT provided the Exiger team with immediate cost insights and 1-click Automated Savings that allowed them to instantly reduce costs by 40%. Setup took less than an hour. Following the initial cost reduction, Exiger has continued to benefit from SELECT's monitoring and visibility to enable immediate identification of waste and prevent future cost overruns.

Five years ago, Exiger operated fragmented data infrastructure across many different database systems. The company adopted Snowflake to create unified data access for product teams, analysts, and data scientists analyzing petabytes of risk management data. Today, Snowflake at Exiger serves 15,000 external users through embedded BI tools while 200 internal analysts constantly iterate on datasets. However, rapid democratization created problems. Users spun up 4XL warehouses for impatient queries, built inefficient SQL without optimization, and scheduled processes without understanding cost implications.

After ramping up adoption of Snowflake, costs exploded by 200% in a single year, which began to raise questions around the organization. The degree of growth was unsustainable. All of leadership was asking why Snowflake costs were growing out of proportion with revenue growth. Before SELECT, Exiger relied on Snowflake's native monitoring which provided no actionable insights or the necessary visibility to drive change.

Exiger needed to rapidly identify why costs were ballooning. SELECT immediately provided granular insights, leading to instant cost wins. Setup took just 20 minutes for the first Snowflake instance and five minutes for each subsequent instance. Through SELECT's Automated Savings feature and deep cost visibility, Exiger was able to immediately lower costs by 40%. SELECT helped identify orphaned projects across 200 analysts - for example, processes running on oversized warehouses with cron jobs against stale data that nobody used anymore.

After eliminating initial waste, Exiger shifted strategy to ongoing monitoring with SELECT's automated cost anomaly alerts. This proactive approach prevents future waste rather than cleaning up after the fact. With Snowflake, you get a warning that your top level budget is off, but no additional granular details as to why. With SELECT, you receive a notification telling you what service spiked, from what workload, when and why, along with all the additional telemetry you need to investigate.

Since adopting SELECT, it has become incorporated into Exiger's engineering workflows. When developing new workloads or experimenting with warehouse configurations, developers can easily monitor costs and performance to make data-driven decisions with confidence. SELECT gave Exiger a very easy way to change culture around spend, and also give senior executives comfort that they had general control over the tools they've entrusted teams with. It's really hard to change culture and to change a 200 person organization's way of thinking, but providing them with airbags and safety nets from SELECT has given them the ability to do exactly that.