What does the data warehousing market landscape look like in the US?

Customer contracts primarily feature usage-based pricing models, driven by fees for compute processing and data storage. To illustrate, Snowflake’s consumption model prices are computed through credits and storage on a TB-month basis (Snowflake, December 2025). However, this model exposes players to customers who optimize their spending during economic stress, when CFOs may mandate cloud cost reductions by shrinking data retention or pausing workloads. As a result, some platforms have shifted toward hybrid pricing, layering in incremental revenue from data transfer fees, subscription tiers for advanced security and governance features, as well as paid support or professional services. For example, Databricks supplements its Databricks unit (DBU)-based pricing with add-ons for security, support, training and professional services, thereby contributing additional recurring and project-based revenue (Databricks, April 2024). In commercial terms, contract structures typically combine usage-based billing with 1- to 3-year subscription commitments. This is exemplified by SingleStore’s Helios service on AWS Marketplace, which offers multi-year contract terms of 12, 24 or 36 months for the managed database offering (AWS, December 2025). On the cost side, players are exposed to third-party public cloud charges for compute, storage and networking, which compress gross margins as customers optimize usage and as pricing pressure outpaces reductions in underlying hyperscaler fees. For example, Teradata reports ~$223m in public cloud fees (~15% of product sales) within its 2024 cost of sales, which highlights the scale of hyperscaler infrastructure costs embedded in its cloud-delivered offering (Teradata, February 2025).