Snowflake

Snowflake charges by the second. Run a query that takes 30 seconds, pay for 30 seconds. Run nothing, pay nothing. Traditional data warehouses charged annual licenses regardless of usage. Snowflake made cost-proportional to value received. The consumption model launched in 2014. Revenue hit 600. 28 million in 2021, 1.9 billion in 2023, and crossed 2.8 billion by 2024. The acceleration happened because consumption compounds. A company starts small, data grows. More teams run more queries. More queries mean more compute. Revenue from a single customer can triple in 12 months without upselling. Net revenue retention peaked at 178% among the highest in enterprise software history.