Escaping the "Snowflake Tax": How we cut data costs by over 50% at New Relic

To eliminate vendor lock-in and rising costs, New Relic migrated over 1,000 datasets from Snowflake to an open, decoupled architecture using Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Amazon S3. By leveraging their own observability tools to ensure data integrity through parallel operations and row-level validation, they successfully completed the transition without disrupting production. This strategic move resulted in a 35–52% reduction in annual data platform expenditures and created a more scalable, cloud-native infrastructure.