Marketplace Monetization: Turn Your Data and Apps into a Revenue Stream

[Snowflake]

Snowflake Marketplace is a vibrant resource, with hundreds of providers offering thousands of ready-to-try or ready-to-buy third-party data sets, applications and services. Many of these providers make their products available on Snowflake Marketplace for Snowflake customers to purchase — and they use our integrated Marketplace Monetization capabilities to simplify the process and speed up procurement and sales cycles. Some even leverage Marketplace Monetization exclusively to avoid having to build, manage or maintain their own billing and payment infrastructure. 

Let’s take a closer look at Snowflake’s monetization options, how providers can maximize their listing flexibility, and why both providers and their customers benefit from simplifying access to the latest data, services and apps.

What is Marketplace Monetization?

Marketplace Monetization allows providers to sell their products to Snowflake customers and invoice them directly through Snowflake. Because they’re purchasing through an already-known vendor, customers can avoid the potentially lengthy process of vetting, onboarding and verifying security policies for a new vendor and start using the data products right away. Shortening the sales, procurement and contracting cycle translates into faster time to value — which is good news for both customers and providers. 

Customers can also easily pay their Snowflake Marketplace invoice via electronic fund transfer, credit card payment or even with their Snowflake capacity commitment (via Marketplace Capacity Drawdown for eligible customers). The customer’s monetary payment is disbursed directly to the provider.

Pricing is, of course, controlled and defined by the provider. It can be custom and privately available/visible for select customers, or be made more general for standardized products that are publicly available. Snowflake offers a multitude of monetization models from pay-as-you-go usage that is based on consumption to all-you-can-eat subscription-based models. No matter which model they use, providers can port their pricing and monetization strategy directly to Snowflake without worrying about pricing strategy mismatch across channels. (Please note: Snowflake currently only supports USD-based pricing for Marketplace Monetization.) 

Understandably, customers may hesitate to pay for a data product without a chance to “kick the tires” a bit and properly evaluate the solution. Snowflake Marketplace takes care of this with several options to allow customers to try out a listing before purchasing:

• Time-limited trials  
• Limited functionality trials, analogous to the “freemium” model common to SaaS products 
• Usage-based trials (currently in private preview)

Many successful providers publish public paid listings with free trials on Snowflake Marketplace to create awareness with new and existing customers. This strategy allows them to address the self-service customer segments while still generating leads for upselling and creating opportunities for private conversations about customized  products.  

One of the most valuable features of Snowflake’s monetization capabilities, in my opinion, is that Snowflake shares end-to-end analytics back to providers. You get a view of valuable information, including:

• How many customers viewed your product listings
• How many customers started a trial
• The amount of product usage and which objects in the share are being used
• Who tried or purchased your product (including contact information) and how much they were charged
• How much money has been disbursed to your bank 

With this depth of insight, providers can focus their time on the most important parts of their funnel to drive new business and close new sales, but always have the entire customer lifecycle view available. 

Snowflake offers all of this functionality out of the box to help our providers reduce overhead for products listed on Snowflake Marketplace, but also to speed up the time to value for the consumers who are using their products. 

What monetization models are available?

There are two monetization models available: usage-based and subscription. 

Our usage-based pricing model allows providers to lower barriers to entry for consumers (also one of the reasons why Snowflake employs usage-based pricing). They can start using your products and get value immediately, without committing to long-term contracts. Examples here include pricing per query or per month when usage occurs. 

Snowflake Native Apps also have an exclusive usage-based pricing model: custom event billing (currently in public preview). This API-based billing allows providers to charge and meter based on nearly any value their app offers. For example, you can specify billing events in your app code and charge consumers based entirely on their usage of your application. This is a flexible, usage-based pricing model to allow providers to price-to-value their applications. Common examples include:

• Price by the number of rows/bytes ingested or number of output rows by the application, such as data clean rooms and applications that enrich data
• Price by number of monthly active rows ingested by the application, such as ETL and reverse ETL
• Price by number of unique users using the application

As the consumer expands their use of and gets more value from the data product or app, providers may want to implement a subscription-based pricing model to give these customers more predictable pricing. Snowflake offers recurring and non-recurring subscription models — with term duration ranging from a single month to many months to multiple years — with a pay up front for access or pay later option. 

Subscription payments can be made even more flexible with the option to pay via installments over the duration of the term. You can configure the subscription to allow portions of the payment to be front-loaded, back-loaded or spread evenly throughout the subscription term depending on the customer’s preferences and the provider’s needs. And, of course, all of the backend processes are handled by Snowflake Marketplace Monetization without additional overhead for the provider. 

Learn more about monetizing data products and services on Snowflake Marketplace

The Snowflake platform offers built-in capabilities that simplify the process of turning your data and apps into fully monetized, revenue-generating assets. To learn more, application developers and builders can check out the monetization module of the Snowflake Native App Bootcamp. If you’re looking to jump-start your data monetization journey, watch our on-demand webinar for examples and suggested steps to set you up for success.  

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