Okay, this is really, really cool and is exactly my niche, as you mentioned it's kinda a combination of things like Stylus/uBlock Origin filters and custom filters/etc. This is really needed, as for example GitHub code preview is completely and utterly fucked, to put it lightly. Showing symbols, not being able to select code properly without weird visual glitches happening..... requires a bunch of scripts to fix. (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/54962).
What's your funding plan? You mentioned paid plan, but what's the actual benefit for users that they would pay for this? (I totally would, FWIW).
Do you foresee companies who need to build special widgets for whatever reason for random websites they use as kind of "Extension light" alternatives - your product reminds me of Retool (https://retool.com/), but for website tweaking.
Very cool product, love the ability to do "extra things" which will fix a whole bunch of websites I use everyday that I CBF'd either making an extension to fix or battling the uBlock/stylus filters.
Everytime you want to query your data, you need to pay the compute cost.
If instead you can write to something like Parquet/Iceberg, you're not paying for access your data.
Snowflake is great at aggregations and other stuff (seriously, huge fan of snowflakes SQL capabilities), but let's say you have a visualisation tool, you're paying for pulling data out
.
Instead, writing data to something like S3, you instead can hookup your tools to this.
It's expensive to pull data out of Snowflake otherwise.
Ok so I build my data lake on s3 using all open tech. I’m still paying for S3 for puts and reads and lists.
Ok I put it on my own hardware. In my own colo. you’re still paying electricity and other things. Everything is lock in.
On top of that you’re beholden to an entire community of people and volunteers to make your tech work. Need a feature? Sponsor it. Or write it and fight to upstream it. On top of that if you do this at scale at a company what about the highly paid team of engineers you have to have to maintain all this?
With snowflake I alone could provide an entire production ready bi stack to a company. And I can do so and sleep well at night knowing it’s managed and taken care of and if it fails entire teams of people are working to fix it.
Are you going to build your own roads, your own power grid, your own police force?
Again my point remains. The vast majority of times people build on a vendor as a partner and then go on to build useful things.
Apple using cloud vendors for iCloud storage. You think they couldn’t do it themselves? They couldn’t find and pay and support all the tech their own? Of course they could. But they have better things to do than to reinvent the wheel I.e building value on top of dumb compute and that’s iCloud.
After running Snowflake in production for 5+ years I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg (which Snowflake fully supports...) than in the table format Snowflake has.
I think a hybrid approach works best (store on Snowflake native and iceberg/tables where needed), and allows you the benefit of Snowflake without paying the cost for certain workloads (which really adds up).
We're going to see more of this (either open or closed source), since Snowflake has acquired Crunchydata, and the last major bastion is "traditional" database <> Snowflake.
They didn't do it out of good will. They realized that's where the market was going and if their query engine didn't perform as well as others on top of iceberg, then they'd be another Oracle in the long-term.
Teams of the smartest people on earth make these kind of big vendor decisions, vendor lock-in is top of mind, I tell anyone who will listen to avoid databricks live tables and their sleezy sales reps pushing it over cheaper less locked in solutions
Snowflake is expensive, even compared to Databricks, and you pay their pre-AWS discount storage price while they get the discount and pocket the difference as profit
Yeah but the Salesforce-ification was a long, slow process. We had our own independent offices and executives for several years. Then the gradual slow drain of the old guard...
I'm not surprised. A few months ago I was reverse engineering their login flow (I was writing a driver for Elixir & Rust), and was getting MANY stack traces and weird bugs happening with their authentication flow, especially around OAuth.
I also love places that are named after someone and it's slightly amusing/horrifying.
Harold Holt was the Australian Prime Minister in the 1960's, and went for a swim and went missing (yes, there are many, MANY local conspiracies this :)). So what did we do? Named a swimming pool[0] after him (construction actually started before his death, I believe).
It is generally agreed that Holt's disappearance was a simple case of an accidental drowning, but a number of conspiracy theories surfaced, most famously the suggestion that he was a spy from the People's Republic of China and had been collected by a Chinese submarine.
