How Personio drove cost awareness while scaling Snowflake across 280+ users
Personio develops software that simplifies or automates HR management processes for smaller companies. Its platform covers payroll, recruiting and other HR processes.
HR Software
2,000 employees
Munich, Germany
2012
Douglas ZickuhrSenior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
Challenges
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.
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
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.
“We actively monitor Snowflake and that's where you guys do a good job for us. We were actually reviewing some cost stories this morning after an incident last Friday”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
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.
“Everyone from my end and from the analytics engineering end would be running different queries to analyze Snowflake costs. We didn't have anything structured and were struggling to connect the dots about how much we're spending on dbt versus other workloads”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
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.
“I literally wanted to be ahead and be able to manage costs because we were preparing ourselves for scaling. I knew that even before we got a lot of users, we would have to manage that somewhere.”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
SELECT's adoption was seamless, requiring no formal training sessions. The platform's intuitive design allowed teams to immediately start using cost visibility features.
“The setup for SELECT was very easy, and quick. We never did any enablement sessions - people found it intuitive enough and started using it right away..”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
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 first thing I was able to do with SELECT was identify exactly which vertical of our analytics team was consuming more. We have multiple verticals under the same dbt project with the same Snowflake user, so we didn't have any way to differentiate before SELECT.”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
The platform's automated Slack alerts created a culture of cost consciousness. Teams began proactively discussing optimization opportunities when alerts highlighted expensive workloads.
“I notice people discussing SELECT's cost alerts in Slack saying 'I can see this table is costing 50% of our spending' and folks tagging each other to discuss. It raises awareness and helps identify cases where we could be spending our budget more wisely.”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
Since adopting SELECT, cost has come to the forefront of engineering discussions. For example, SELECT recently helped the team make key decisions around data retention policies based on the forecasted costs.
“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
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. The team was able to identify and decommission models which were costing a lot but not adding enough value to the business to justify their cost and therefore made the decision to deprecate.
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%.
“We were able to reduce DAG execution duration by probably 60% just by visualizing the order of materializations. You could see clearly what model was blocking other models and scale up to a stronger warehouse.”
Douglas Zickuhr
Senior Data Platform Engineer at Personio
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.
Up next.More Customer Stories.
Get up and running in less than 15 minutes
Connect your Snowflake account and instantly understand your savings potential.
