What he was paying for
- Two vendors, six to eight people between them, billing by the hour and working out to three or four full-time equivalents. One owned ingestion and the warehouse, the other owned the datamarts and the reports.
- Snowflake averaging a bit over $700 a month, AWS a few thousand more. The infrastructure was never the cost.
- A warehouse about two years old, of which at most 40% could be reused for the second indication.
- One report showing an email open rate of 181% that nobody had flagged, and an analyst on the commercial team quietly rebuilding the numbers out of the CRM.