SELECT vs. Homegrown Cost Monitoring

About SELECT

SELECT was founded in 2022 and is led by experienced practitioners with deep expertise in optimizing Snowflake spend. Their SaaS web application helps users monitor, control and automatically lower spend. They integrate tightly with popular data tools such as dbt, Looker, Sigma (and more..) that sit on top of Snowflake by providing cost attribution to the workloads originating from these systems. In addition, SELECT automatically lowers Snowflake customer’s compute spend by 10-20% without any effort from their end.

Homegrown tooling

Many customers we speak with build and maintain their own spend monitoring tooling, typically in their BI tool of choice (i.e. PowerBI).

Detailed Comparison

The comparison below is based on what we see customers typically build in house.

Cost Visibility & Allocation

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Out of the box spend dashboards	✅	✅
See costs in dollars, not credits	✅	✅
See cost per query	✅	✅
Analyze remaining contract usage and forecast	✅	❌
Connect multiple Snowflake accounts	✅	✅
Drill into cloud services cost drivers	✅	❌
Warehouse Utilization	✅	❌
Intelligent query grouping based on query similarity	✅	✅
Analyze Snowflake (Cortex) AI costs	✅	❌
See top users and queries per table	✅	❌
See costs by query tag	✅	❌
See costs by table accessed	✅	❌
See cost per Snowpipe	✅	❌
See cost by table	✅	❌
See query read/write costs by table	✅	❌
See cost per Task	✅	❌
See cost per Stored Procedure	✅	❌
See cost per Dynamic Table	✅	❌
See cost per dashboard	✅	❌
Advanced filtering capabilities	✅	❌
Understand total asset cost with lineage	✅	❌
Save frequently applied filters as views	✅	❌
Analyze costs by Snowflake object tags	✅	❌

Performance Monitoring

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Analyze query performance by warehouse	✅	✅
Analyze query queuing by warehouse	✅	❌
Analyze data spillage warehouse	✅	❌
See historical query performance	✅	❌
See historical query stats (data scanned, pruning efficiency, spillage, etc.)	✅	❌

Savings & Recommendations

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Automatically save costs through warehouse optimization	✅	❌
View and audit generated savings	✅	❌
Identify misconfigured warehouses	✅	❌
Query optimization recommendations	✅	❌
Underutilized warehouses	✅	❌
Table clustering key analysis	✅	❌
Workloads with high spillage	✅	✅
Innefficient file sizes for data loading	✅	❌
Query warehouse sizing recommendations	✅	❌
Identify unused tables, schemas and databases	✅	❌
Exploding join detection	✅	❌
Identify tables with unnecessary data retention costs	✅	❌
Filter recommendations by team, department, warehouse, or tags	✅	❌

Integrations

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
dbt core	✅	❌
dbt Cloud	✅	❌
Looker	✅	❌
Sigma	✅	❌
Mode	✅	❌
Hex	✅	❌
Periscope	✅	❌
Coalesce.io	✅	❌
Tableau	Coming soon..	❌
PowerBI	Coming soon..	❌

Alerting

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Get notified of account level cost spikes	✅	✅
Send alerts to Email	✅	✅
Send alerts to Slack	✅	❌
Send alerts to Teams	✅	❌
Send alerts to OpsGenie	✅	❌
Send alerts to PagerDuty	✅	❌
Long running query alerts	✅	❌
Configure alerts for warehouses, users or queries	✅	❌
Define alerts with custom SQL queries	✅	❌
Customize the alert message & contents	✅	❌
Send alerts to multiple destinations	✅	❌

Cost Allocations

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Allocate costs by database	✅	✅
Allocate costs by warehouse	✅	✅
Allocate costs by Snowflake user	✅	✅
Allocate costs using Snowflake object tags	✅	❌
Allocate AI costs by user, warehouse or LLM model	✅	❌
Allocate AI costs from query tags / query metadata	✅	❌
Allocate by dbt tags or resource names	✅	❌
Allocate costs by table/schema	✅	❌
Allocate costs by BI tool user	✅	❌
See version history of cost allocations	✅	❌
Manage cost allocations via JSON/YAML	✅	❌

Budgets

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Set monthly budgets	✅	❌
Set yearly budgets	✅	❌
Set a budget for spend from multiple Snowflake accounts in your organization	✅	❌
Set a budget for individual warehouses, or groups of warehouses	✅	❌
Set a budget for individual Snowflake users, or groups of users	✅	❌
Get alerted if budget is exceeded	Coming soon..	❌

Security

Capability	SELECT	Homegrown Dashboard
Whitelisted IP address	✅	✅
Key-Pair Authentication Support	✅	✅
Flexible RBAC & roles assignment	✅	✅
Restrict access at the resource level	✅	❌
Automatically rotate keys via API	✅	❌
Integration with Okta SSO	✅	✅
Integration with Entra ID (Azure AD) SSO	✅	✅
Integration with OneLogin SSO	✅	✅
Integration with PingFed SSO	✅	✅
Automatically assign roles based on SSO groups	✅	❌

Pricing

SELECT offers flat rate pricing tailored to your Snowflake usage, at 3% of your annual Snowflake spend. You can pay with your existing Snowflake credits, and we always ensure we save you more than we charge, guaranteed.

A homegrown dashboard can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year depending on the level of effort and involvement by the team. Some example costs, assuming a fully loading employee cost of $250,000/year:

1 month/year --> $20,000/year
3 months/year --> $60,000/year
1 full time employee --> $250,000/year
2 full time employees --> $500,000/year

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of using SELECT?

SELECT is an end-to-end Snowflake cost management and optimization platform. SELECT powers over 200 customers, helping them:

Automatically save 10-20% through fully automated and real time warehouse optimizations
Gain unparalleled cost visibility into all Snowflake workloads and spend drivers
Optimize Snowflake resources through tailored insights & recommendations
Monitor and control spend through flexible alerting
Democratize spend management by providing users and teams throughout the organization with fine-grained access into their Snowflake usage

What makes SELECT a better alternative to homegrown dashboard?

SELECT offers the following key advantages over a typical homegrown dashboard:

Fully automated savings: SELECT helps customers automatically lower their spend by 10-20% through fully automated and real time warehouse optimizations.
Detailed insights & recommendations: SELECT scans all Snowflake resources and queries for common anti-patterns and innefficiencies, and surfaces up detailed optimization recommendations to its end users, typically providing additional savings opportunities of 20-30%.
Deeper cost visbility: SELECT provides much deeper visibility into Snowflake usage, highlighting the annualized costs of all Snowflake resources (tables, tasks, LLM models) and making them readily accessible within a few clicks.
Integrations: SELECT integrates with common tools used on top of Snowflake that drive significant consumption (dbt, Looker, Sigma, etc.) and surfaces their costs along with optimization opportunities.
Flexible & automated cost anomaly alerts: SELECT allows customers to setup flexible anomaly alerts with a few clicks and allows users to send those alerts to Email, Slack, MS Teams, or other alerting destinations like Pager Duty. SELECT's alerts can be configured at a very granular level: by team, user, query, tags, and more.
Cost visibility access controls: Many Snowflake customers do not want to expose their total Snowflake bill to all users in the company. SELECT allows its customers to expose a subset of Snowflake costs from selected resources to each team/department .
Zero maintenance and effort required: SELECT has a team of over 10 engineers who build and maintain SELECT's cost monitoring capabilities, add cost monitoring support for new Snowflake functionality, and handle breaking changes to the Snowflake metadata database.
Battle tested: SELECT product is used and battle tested by hundreds of companies every day.