How Exiger dropped their Snowflake costs by 40% in two weeks
Exiger provides technology and solutions for managing risk and compliance, focusing on supply chain and third-party risk management
Risk management and compliance software
1,000+
New York City, United States
2013
Skyler ChiSVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
Challenges
Exiger's Snowflake costs ballooned by over 200% year over year, raising questions around the company around whether it could be sustainably managed. As Snowflake's rudimentary monitoring provided no granularity into cost drivers or actionable optimization insights, the Exiger team looked to SELECT to help drive immediate results.
Solution
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.
Results
- Reduced Snowflake spend by 40% within two weeks through SELECT Automated Savings and detailed cost insights
- Achieved 20x ROI on SELECT investment
- Prevented $700K in additional cost increases through automated anomaly alerts
- Enabled cultural shift to FinOps mindset across 200+ analysts without dedicated oversight
Snowflake became mission-critical but cost controls and visibility lagged behind adoption
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.
“We had released the power of Snowflake, which was like giving the keys to a Ferrari to people without driver's licenses. To a certain extent you want to enable people to move quickly so they can innovate, but we also needed to increase our controls and monitoring to prevent unnecessary waste, and that's where SELECT came in”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
Before SELECT, Exiger relied on Snowflake's native monitoring which provided no actionable insights or the necessary visibility to drive change.
“Snowflake's inherent controls are lacking. It's a single dashboard that doesn't provide any granularity into what is actually driving the costs and what you can do about it.”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
SELECT delivered immediate visibility and over 40% in automated cost savings
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.
“Your documentation received comments from both our security organization and the individual developers that work on Snowflake - it's some of the best they've seen”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
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. By easily identifying business owners in SELECT, Exiger's team could quickly drive remediation.
“Through SELECT's automated savings feature and deep cost visibility, we were able to instantly lower our Snowflake spend by over 40% and achieve a 20X ROI on our SELECT investment.”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
Real-time anomaly detection prevents major cost increases
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'll receive a notification telling you what service spiked, from what workload, when and why, along with all the additional telemetry you need to investigate. It's a night and day difference.”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
“Thanks to SELECT's monitoring and lineage, we were able to identify a job running more frequently than the upstream dataset was being populated, change four lines of code and prevented a new workload from costing $800,000/year to only $50,000”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
SELECT has enabled a cultural shift in costs, while still allowing innovation and rapid iteration
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 in which we were able to change culture around spend, and also give senior executives at the company comfort that we had general control over the tools that they've entrusted us with”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
When FinOps, the greatest cloud cost savings come from costs never born. To accomplish that, you need to drive a culture of cost awareness and move away from becoming the "query police".
“It's really, 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 us the ability to do exactly that. We no longer have to babysit all the teams”
Skyler Chi
SVP, GTM Productivity & Excellence at Exiger
Next steps with SELECT: Shifting left to catch issues early
Moving forward, Exiger will continue to leverage SELECT to drive cost awareness across the organization while catching potential spend issues immediately to avoid waste. The focus has now changed to a more proactive, "shift left" approach that prevent problems before they occur.
As Exiger migrates more data into Snowflake to eliminate remaining silos and centralizes data in Iceberg, SELECT will continue providing essential cost observability for their expanding data platform. This growth will unlock new use cases while SELECT ensures costs remain under control.
Skyler's only wish is that SELECT existed for AWS.
“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
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