The best data warehouse for startups with a small data team
For a small data team without a dedicated platform engineer, Google BigQuery is the easiest data warehouse for startups to start on. It's serverless, so there's no cluster to size, and on-demand pricing charges $6.25 per TiB of data scanned with the first 1 TiB free every month. Snowflake and Databricks both do more, but both ask you to manage warehouse sizing or Spark clusters before the bill gets predictable, and neither publishes a flat starting price.
All three bill on usage, not a flat subscription, so "best" here means the best cost model and the least to manage before you know what you're doing, not cheapest in every scenario. A team that lets a query scan an unfiltered table, or leaves a Snowflake warehouse running overnight, can rack up a bill that has nothing to do with the tool's list price.
Cost model: pay-per-query vs. pay-per-second vs. pay-per-DBU
All three vendors separate storage and compute billing, but the compute unit, and how much manual tuning it takes to control it, differs a lot.
