One good reason is that a huge population of companies just don't have enough data to justify Snowflake. We sell a product built on it, and I wish we'd had DuckDB 3-4 years ago; it's perfect for 95%+ of our clients

I think DuckDB is great but I don't think it is necessarily playing the same game as Snowflake. A lot of people want the serverless option and DuckDB is not that.

DuckDB on a lambda/serverless python function wrapper or in WASM (for client-side workloads) is as stateless and serverless as you can get.

In that case BigQuery is more managed than both, PAYG for analytical queries without thinking about compute nor clusters whatsoever.

BigQuery is more expensive than Snowflake though. You might as well just do Motherduck which would be cheaper than BQ but let you pull data from S3 which is cheaper than Snowflake storage.

Just for the data sharing feature alone it's worth using. It's so damn easy to onboard and maintain data sources when they have a Snowflake share. You don't have to worry each day about loading processes randomly failing and you don't have to write any custom logic to hit APIs and properly flatten and merge responses into the database.