Snowflake has their own storage unless you opt for the enterprise version to have it stored in your own account. They also use their own table format (like BigQuery) but you can always export it.
It's true that AWS has Redshift Spectrum (and Athena) to help with more scalable querying across S3, however I don't think that makes a big risk for another company that provide a focused offering on top. Snowflake is very well capitalized with close to $500M in investment and plenty of customers so I wouldn't worry about them going out of business.
I especially like them because they have the elastic computing style of BigQuery but charge for computing time rather than data scanned, which is a much more effective billing model than anything else out there.
What's the focused offering provided by them? Does their system more scalable, efficient or cheap or is there any technical limitations of the AWS products? Personally, I don't think $500M matters if their customers (I'm assuming most of their revenue comes from enterprise customers because that's how it works usually) churn in a few years.
A more focused data warehouse product that is priced on a better model and is more scalable and efficient and cheaper than any of the existing options. $500M means they'll be around longer than most of the startup customers that try them.
Anyway, at this point I'm just repeating myself so I suggest you actually try them if you care for a better model. It works for us at 600B rows of data that was too expensive with BigQuery and too slow and complicated with Redshift/Spectrum.
Sounds fair. I'm convinced to try out their service, it's good to see that they also added pricing to their website. Let's see how it's better compared to Presto as they have the similar use-case.
It's true that AWS has Redshift Spectrum (and Athena) to help with more scalable querying across S3, however I don't think that makes a big risk for another company that provide a focused offering on top. Snowflake is very well capitalized with close to $500M in investment and plenty of customers so I wouldn't worry about them going out of business.
I especially like them because they have the elastic computing style of BigQuery but charge for computing time rather than data scanned, which is a much more effective billing model than anything else out there.