I have been a huge Storybook and Chromatic fan for years. But at some point the bill got my attention, and when I looked into why, the fix turned out to be simple. This is the write-up of what I changed. It works on any per-snapshot tool, not just Chromatic.
First, some backstory on how I got here, because it explains why the cost crept up in the first place.
How I ended up paying for a lot of snapshots
In the past I would build a gigantic end-to-end pipeline that was flaky as hell and made me spend time every week fixing it. It took 40 minutes to run, and when it went red someone would assume it was just flaky, merge the change anyway, and then find out it truly did break the system.
So I stopped writing lots of E2Es and moved to Storybook for interaction and visual testing. Much better. But because I was rendering every state of every component as its own story to get the screenshots in place, I was generating a lot of screenshots. And every snapshot tool, Chromatic, Percy, Playwright screenshots, UI Verify, renders and bills per story. So the number of stories is the cost, and it is also the noise surface: more stories means more places for a diff to flake.
