How Personio drove cost awareness while scaling Snowflake across 280+ users

HR software company transforms fragmented cost management into structured visibility across multiple analytics verticals

The Challenge

Personio was scaling rapidly on Snowflake with 280+ direct users across analytics, machine learning, and customer-facing applications. They relied on manual queries against Snowflake metadata and Google Sheets to understand costs, with different teams running inconsistent analyses. As their consumption grew, they needed structured cost management to avoid budget overruns.

The Solution

SELECT provided immediate visibility into cost allocation across Personio's multiple analytics verticals through usage groups and dbt integration. The platform's intuitive interface required no formal training, allowing teams to quickly adopt cost-conscious workflows. Automated Slack alerts and saved views streamlined ongoing cost monitoring, while the Insights feature regularly surfaces quick-win savings opportunities.

Results

Reduced dbt pipeline execution times by 60% through warehouse sizing insights
Enabled flexible cost allocation across business verticals for accurate showbacks
Automated Slack alerting increased cost awareness throughout engineering teams
Eliminated manual cost reporting workflows and inconsistent analysis across teams

SELECT has made important cost data readily accessible. I will often pull it up during engineering design reviews so we can quickly evaluate cost impact and projections and factor that into our design decisions.
Douglas Zickuhr, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio

Scaling Snowflake without cost visibility

Personio operates a modern data stack with Snowflake as their core warehouse, supporting both internal analytics and customer-facing features. With 280+ direct Snowflake users across analytics engineering, data science, and machine learning teams, the platform powers everything from HR dashboards to AI-driven insights. Before SELECT, cost management was fragmented and manual. Teams ran different queries against Snowflake metadata, analyzed results in Google Sheets, and struggled to connect the dots between workloads and spending.

Getting ahead of growth with SELECT

As Snowflake consumption accelerated, Douglas recognized the need for proactive cost management. The company was preparing for scale and needed visibility before costs became a business concern. SELECT's adoption was seamless, requiring no formal training sessions. The platform's intuitive design allowed teams to immediately start using cost visibility features.

Driving a culture of cost awareness

SELECT transformed how Personio approaches Snowflake cost management. Usage groups enabled precise cost allocation across analytics verticals supporting different departments - engineering, customer experience, and sales. The platform's automated Slack alerts created a culture of cost consciousness. Teams began proactively discussing optimization opportunities when alerts highlighted expensive workloads. Since adopting SELECT, cost has come to the forefront of engineering discussions.

Optimizing data pipeline execution times

One significant win came through SELECT's dbt integration and DAG visualization. The team identified bottlenecks in their morning data pipeline and optimized warehouse sizing to reduce execution time by 60%. By regularly reviewing SELECT every week, the analytics engineering team has been able to quickly review their new data models and carefully evaluate the ROI of their data products.

Looking ahead with SELECT

As Personio continues expanding their AI platform and exploring Snowflake Cortex, SELECT remains central to their cost optimization strategy to ensure positive ROI and proactive monitoring on their AI investments. With tight morning data windows and growing ML workloads, SELECT helps ensure optimal performance while maintaining cost efficiency as the platform scales.

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What they say

This is the easiest thing we've ever done to save money - 20x ROI. Does this not exist for AWS?

Skyler Chi, SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger

SELECT feels like exactly what Paul and I would have built if we had locked ourselves in a room for 18 months to create our ideal monitoring solution.

Devin McGee, Data Engineering Lead at Home Chef

SELECT has made important cost data readily accessible. I will often pull it up during engineering design reviews so we can quickly evaluate cost impact and projections and factor that into our design decision.

Douglas Zickuhr, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio

Our costs had jumped up 3X as we scaled, so we're talking about 60% savings in Snowflake spend after adopting SELECT.

Edward Mancey, GTM Lead at Synthesia

SELECT dramatically lowers the cognitive load to understanding Snowflake costs. I'm able to sit there and easily understand what's driving the cost.

Blake Baggett, Head of Data Operations at Entain

You guys have the best UI experience that I've had of any software. It's like you just read my mind where, like, oh, I wish I could click there. Oh, wait, I can!

Diana Koshy, Sr. Director of Data Engineering at Kargo

SELECT works the way my brain works. I love clicking through the query patterns and different workloads. It's a very intuitive diagnostic flow.

Ian Fahey, Senior Analytics Engineer at Loop

One of the most helpful cost rituals we've setup from SELECT is the weekly spend digest sent to Slack. I can start high level and ensure things are in check.

Michael Revelo, Manager of data and analytics engineering at ClickUp