Snowplow has a range of pricing and deployment options depending on your strategic needs.
Snowplow Behavioral Data Platform (BDP)
Snowplow BDP has two separate deployment options, BDP Cloud and BDP Enterprise.
BDP Cloud is our hosted solution which makes it cheaper and easier for companies to start using behavioral data, albeit with a limited feature set compared to Enterprise.
BDP Enterprise is hosted in your own private cloud but the infrastructure is managed by Snowplow – this is known as “private SaaS”.
Pricing for Snowplow BDP Cloud
BDP Cloud costs from $800 per month after a free trial. This gives smaller organizations access to the power of one of the most widely used open-source data tools in the world (#3 tracker globally) – without the technical requirements of open-source implementations. You also get additional functionality, such as a collector uptime SLA, support for BigQuery, and a user interface.
Pricing for Snowplow BDP Enterprise
BDP Enterprise has custom pricing, depending on the number of events and your chosen tier.
You can choose between Basecamp, Ascent, and Summit, depending on the functionality and technical support you need.
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Snowplow Open Source costs
Snowplow Open Source has two setup options, manual and Quick Start.
We recommend following the Quick Start guide as it’s easier, faster, and comes with a lot of components pre-configured. Both options are free, but have nominal hosting costs from your 3rd-party provider.
With both options you can tweak various parameters – such as instance sizes – to adapt to your data volumes, which will have a direct impact on these costs.
Out-of-the-box, the pipeline set up using Quick Start will handle up to ~100 events per second (~9 million events per day) and cost ~$200 (depending on data transfer costs) per month for ~100 events per second in AWS infrastructure costs, and ~$240 on GCP.
Open Source vs BDP: the cost of a data team
Snowplow Open Source has been adopted by over 10,000 users and – being open source – the software itself costs nothing. That being said, a direct cost comparison is not straightforward.
In order to run our OS pipeline for anything business-critical, you would need to dedicate team resources to pipeline management, including upgrades and ensuring the infrastructure is always up and running.
The cost of effectively managing this could be the same or more than a BDP implementation, but without the years of experience offered by our support team, who can often solve issues in minutes, preventing costly data downtime.
As a result, many companies prefer to invest their resources in creating data applications with Snowplow BDP – especially when use cases are linked to core strategic goals.
Snowplow Open Source is a powerful tool with incredible flexibility, but teams should look at their objectives and resources before making a decision – here’s a guide.
