SNOWSnowflake Inc.

Snowflake sells data storage and processing on consumption pricing rather than per seat.

The platform separates storage from compute, and the customer pays for each on actual usage. Hence a distinctive revenue pattern: it rises when customers compute more and falls when they optimise their queries. The health metric is not subscription count but consumption growth among existing customers.

It runs on other people's clouds — Amazon, Microsoft, Google — which removes capital spending but makes those same providers partners and competitors at once: each has its own data warehouse. Snowflake's differentiation is independence from any single cloud and ease of sharing data between organisations.

Consumption pricing cuts both ways: it lowers the barrier to entry but makes revenue sensitive to customer belt-tightening in a difficult year. The growth direction is processing data for machine-learning models inside the warehouse itself. The company pays no dividend.