Why Snowflake Native

Insights That Led to Twing Pulse

In 2007, Apple simultaneously shattered the computer and mobile phone industries with the introduction of the iphone. In 2008, they followed up with the app store, shattering the software distribution model and catalyzing a new mobile-first economy. Seventeen years later, what started as a mobile revolution has become a full-blown cross-platform app economy, spanning not just B2C but even B2B. With products in categories like CRM (Salesforce), collaboration (Slack, Zoom, etc), project management (Trello), and analytics (Tableau), decision-makers expect to manage ops from phones, tablets, and even smartwatches.

Today, the entire app lifecycle lives on the cloud, from development and deployment, to data pipelines, payment, compliance, and even user interaction. Snowflake’s relatively new app marketplace is a refreshingly unique and opinionated twist on the AWS approach that focuses on low ops integrations for data sharing and represents the expansion from warehousing to the OS of the enterprise data stack.

Enter: Snowflake

Snowflake launched onto the scene as a product sitting atop one particular cloud vertical, the data warehouse. Now it’s expanding horizontally with some depth in all the major data categories, like lakehouses, OLAP, data exchanges, BI/ML/AI, and more. In tandem with their product development, the user base continues to grow at a steady pace. It’s no wonder - aside from the novel warehouse UX, the prospect of doing ML, cross-cloud data sharing, etc with none of the complexity/latency/risks of transferring data to external tools is a great UVP.

Their Native App Marketplace represents Snowflake’s expansion from mere networked warehousing to being the OS of the enterprise data stack. A departure from the AWS/GCP approach to apps, its highly opinionated, deeply integrated experience is focused solely on data and ai applications that run securely within the user’s Snowflake environment.

As a user, the accessibility of downloading an app and running it on your data with zero configuration is quite an experience. Also, because the app runs entirely within your own Snowflake account, it enables the use of external tools that would otherwise be impossible on tables with sensitive or valuable data. Combined with Snowflake’s strict permission model, object isolation, and transparent resource usage, this architecture offers a level of control and trust that’s difficult to match — even with custom, self-hosted solutions.

As a developer, backend development has a new paradigm with a moderate learning curve (as expected) and the frontend, if used, is extremely limited and opinionated. While frustrating at times, these constraints also focus the product and force simplicity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On top of that, we get the advantages of increased visibility, streamlined procurement, and the elimination of overhead associated with infra management or custom integrations.

Finally, while monetization is well integrated, reporting and billing aren’t quite up to the standard of AWS.

But who cares? As a data system optimization business, the advantages are obvious.

The Business Case For Building On Snowflake

Procurement

Twing Data’s core strength is its warehouse-agnostic analysis engine. Among the three large warehouses we currently support - BigQuery, Snowflake, and Redshift - there are major differences. We’ve invested deeply, and sometimes painfully, in making our systems flexible to handle each platform’s data and surface the appropriate insights. This gives us access to a wider customer base, and moves us towards our target of full end to end analysis.

The flip side: Depending on the industry/client, an external data connection comes with security/compliance concerns, and can even be a non-starter altogether. In our experience it can frequently lead to months of legal reviews and contract revisions. This is just another day for large enterprises, but we are a small team, so maintaining these ongoing open cases is not ideal for us.

This is simply not an issue if the data never leaves the client’s system. Native apps run directly in the user’s warehouse environment. A marketplace install and quick permissions agreement in the UI replace tens of hours of work by lawyers and engineers. Importantly, creators’ IP is also protected, as the queries run are not exposed to the user.

Finally, aside from the security and compliance hurdles, budget approval for data tooling is a hard sell. Executives in charge of allocating budgets typically prioritize investments that directly impact sales, and saving on data spend is typically far down the list. Billing on Native Apps contributes to existing Snowflake spend, eliminating the need for data teams to request an additional separate budget.

Visibility and Accessibility

The platform power of app stores has been proven time and time again. Users know to look there, and apps want to be there. The Snowflake Marketplace is just a baby, with some large limitations and hurdles on the development side, but the visibility is massive. Look at these numbers:

• Snowflake Marketplace: 38 data products per monthly active user

• AWS Marketplace: 7.8 apps per user

(based on “active customers” who transact on a regular basis. See source below)

Now, consider that AWS hosts a vast range of apps across every imaginable use case. Snowflake, on the other hand, is focused tightly on data and analytics. That means a much higher percentage of Snowflake users are in a Native App’s direct target market.

Summary of Market Opportunity

While mobile app stores are at maturity, now growing at 15-20% YoY, B2B marketplaces are earlier in the curve, similar to an earlier phase of B2C adoption, growing at 50-100% YoY.

That’s great for the marketplaces that capitalize on volume alone, but does that trickle down to the creators? The earlier one is on the platform, the more this is true. It’s still early days on the Snowflake Marketplace. The advantages are potentially enormous, IF you can capitalize on them.

One advantage is that it’s possible to develop a closer relationship with the platform. Snowflake has a “co-sell with partners” culture, and are actively looking to showcase Native Apps in their marketplace. Other benefits could be roadmap previews, design partner programs, or inclusion in investor/demo events.

Another is that there are so few listings currently (~3000). Being early on a platform means there’s high visibility and the opportunity for category leadership, or even to define a new category. With over 100,000 monthly active users, that means there are, as previously mentioned, 38 users for every app. In a straight comparison to AWS and GCP (and any other market), these are great numbers. And given the narrow market scope and the frictionless integrations, the likelihood to connect to users is much higher on Snowflake.

Give Our App a Try

Procurement struggles that involve hurdles like regulatory compliance keep companies from using industry-leading tools that could potentially help unlock massive value. For the developers of those products, like us, it can be equally stifling.

So far, Snowflake Native has been a simple way to promote our features to clients natively, while protecting our IP. We're continually iterating and delivering more sophisticated features as we validate our hypotheses. If you’re a Snowflake user and are interested in deeper observability to connect how your system is actually used with Snowflake’s execution and pricing behaviors, give Twing Pulse a download. It’s free, and all we ask is that you send us some feedback. We can then prioritize the highest-impact improvements and feature migrations.

For an idea of what’s to come to Twing Pulse, reach out to us for demo links to our full platform at twingdata.com.

Have you developed for the Snowflake Native Marketplace? What was your experience? Let us know below!