How Entain achieved 35% Snowflake savings by empowering teams with better cost management tooling

SELECT provided immediate cost visibility with dramatically reduced cognitive load compared to Entain's internal solutions. The platform enabled quick identification of optimization opportunities through comprehensive cost breakdown and insights features. SELECT's intuitive interface eliminated the friction that caused teams to abandon their previous cost monitoring efforts, while automated savings delivered immediate ROI.

Entain's data analytics team managed everything downstream from their betting engine, initially running on MySQL infrastructure that couldn't scale with their growing needs. The team needed cloud infrastructure that could scale instantly and eliminate the risk of multi-day outages that crippled their analytical capabilities. Snowflake solved their immediate scalability problems, supporting 900 registered users with approximately 100-150 heavy users across data engineers, analysts, automation engineers, data science, trading technology, and marketing technology teams. However, the migration's tight deadlines led to suboptimal implementations that would later drive unexpected cost increases.

Before SELECT, Entain built internal cost monitoring through Power BI reports that grouped Snowflake users into logical business domains. The solution queried account usage schemas and applied arbitrary credit cost values to provide high-level spending visibility across teams. While this approach worked for basic pulse checks, it had significant limitations for actual optimization work. The Power BI solution lacked alerts, budgets, and the granular insights needed for optimization. Teams could see that Data Science was spending a certain amount, but couldn't drill down to understand which specific jobs or queries were driving costs. Additional technical limitations made the system frustrating to use: UTC timezone delays meant previous day costs weren't visible until 11am, and Snowsight couldn't render more than 2-3 days of data due to too many data points.

Within two months of adopting SELECT, Entain achieved a 35% reduction in total annual Snowflake costs while actually adding more business workloads to the platform. This dramatic cost reduction came through multiple targeted optimizations that SELECT made immediately visible and actionable. The first major win came from database storage optimization, where SELECT instantly highlighted a database costing $60K/year in backup costs. The team was able to quickly make the decision to switch the table from permanent to transient for massive savings.

SELECT's insights enabled Entain to optimize their data ingestion infrastructure. The team switched to Gen2 warehouses for their high-frequency merge operations, running 950 Kafka topics across two Gen2 extra small warehouses. This optimization reduced their ingestion costs from 300 credits per day to 80 credits per day - approximately $200K/year in savings. The team now merges every 20 minutes across 900 tables with no queuing issues.

SELECT transformed how Entain manages Snowflake costs, becoming their single source of truth for all cost monitoring and optimization activities. The team now uses daily Slack digests to track long-running queries, largest increased workloads, and new workflows. Blake conducts weekly reviews with each department to discuss cost changes and create 3-4 Jira optimization tickets based on SELECT insights. This systematic approach ensures no optimization opportunities are missed while maintaining clear visibility into the ROI of improvement efforts.

SELECT enabled a cultural shift toward proactive cost optimization across Entain's development teams. The team shared SELECT's cost optimization tips in communication channels, leading to engineers actively discussing and sharing query improvements. Engineers began sharing before-and-after optimization results, with managers playfully competing on week-over-week job costs. This gamification approach made cost optimization engaging rather than burdensome. The platform also changed how the team approaches optimization investment decisions. Previously, cost optimization was often dismissed as too hard or just the cost of doing business. Now, SELECT provides clear visibility into potential savings before investing development time, enabling confident resource allocation decisions with quantifiable ROI expectations.