Dashboards tell you what happened.Aperture tells you what to do.
A five-day Snowflake environment audit — cost, security, freshness, data usefulness — delivered as a board-ready report by a Blue Thread consultant. Fixed fee. No subscription. No dashboard to log into.
From £10,000 · 5 days · fixed fee · Snowflake customers with real spend
Waste · Risk · Rot
Three problems every Snowflake customer has — and can't see.
Snowsight shows you queries. It doesn't show you what's leaking, what's exposed, or what nobody reads any more.
Over-provisioned. Under-attributed.
Warehouses that stayed size-XL after one Q4 spike and never came back down. Forgotten tables. Time-travel bytes on data nobody touches. The dashboards show usage — they don't show waste.
Silent security drift.
Users without MFA. Over-privileged roles nobody reviews. PII in tables that shouldn't have it. Freshness gaps that break board-level trust. Snowsight shows queries — not posture.
Data nobody reads.
Pipelines nobody owns. Tables 90 days stale but still storing. Reports with zero consumers still running in prod. Every quarter, more silt — eventually the pipes back up.
Most Snowflake customers estimate 20–40% of their bill is waste. They just can't prove which20–40% — so they can't fix it. That's the audit gap this closes.
All three problems have the same root. Snowsight was built to show queries. It wasn't built to audit an environment. Cost tools like Select.dev are a dashboard subscription — they don't cover security, freshness or data usefulness, and they don't produce anything you can hand to a board.
One scan · four axes
What Aperture audits.
Every axis rolls up into the same findings list, ranked by dollar impact and severity. The report reads the same whether you're a CDO who wants the grade or a DataOps lead who wants the query.
Cost & usage
Warehouse map, credit consumption, spend anomalies, storage cost, time-travel bloat, per-team attribution. Every finding carries a dollar figure.
Security posture
MFA coverage, over-privileged roles, network policies, PII exposure, access anomalies, dormant users. Evidence in the shape a compliance auditor expects.
Data freshness
Table-level freshness signals, pipelines with broken cadence, stale dependencies, and the downstream reports that quietly went wrong.
Data usefulness
Bytes read per table over 30, 60 and 90 days. Which tables have zero consumers. Which storage cost is paying for data nobody looks at.
Findings synthesis
All four axes rolled up into a prioritised, dollar-attached, owner-assignable action list. Delta view across scans. A grade per axis.
Friday afternoon
What you have at the end of the week.
Environment scorecard
A single page with a letter grade per axis, the year-to-date dollars recovered, and the trend arrows. What a CFO reads in ninety seconds.
Board-ready audit report
Twenty pages, branded, editable, ready to hand to your board without translation. Nothing on it is a screenshot of a dashboard.
Prioritised findings list
Every finding has a dollar figure, an effort estimate, and a slot for an owner. It is an action list, not a diagnosis.
Ninety-day remediation roadmap
Sequenced by dollar impact and dependency. Written so somebody who wasn't in the workshop can still act on it.
Pricing
From £10,000. Fixed on the call. Never moves.
Your tier follows your Snowflake spend, because scale determines how much estate there is to audit. We establish which applies on the discovery call — it's never more than the number quoted.
Starter
£10,000
Under $100k Snowflake spend
A single-account scan for teams under five, with the report and a readout.
1 week
Growth
£20,000
$100k – $250k Snowflake spend
Baseline plus two delta scans, a board-ready report, and a workshop.
2 weeks
Scale
£30,000
$250k – $500k Snowflake spend
Multi-account, custom scanner configuration, and two workshop days.
3 weeks
Enterprise
Talk to us
$500k+ Snowflake spend
Bespoke scope for multi-region, multi-account, executive-sponsored programmes.
Scoped per engagement
A different sale
The dashboard tools do one thing. We do four — and hand you the report.
Select.dev is a cost tool at $1,499 a month, subscription-forever. Keebo tunes your warehouses in production — many enterprise change-boards can't allow that. Bluesky decomposes the bill. SpendView from DataOps.live is a free cost dashboard designed to sell you their platform.
Aperture isn't any of those. It's a fixed-fee audit across cost, security, freshness and data usefulness — with a consultant to walk you through it and a board-ready PDF at the end. You wouldn't buy furniture without sitting on it. You shouldn't buy Snowflake tooling without seeing the deliverable first.
Twenty minutes to find out if there's anything here.
No deck, no discovery theatre. You describe the environment; we tell you whether an audit would find anything worth the money.
Send us the details
Snowflake account topology, rough spend, what triggered you to look — a paragraph is fine. We'll come back within one working day with times.
Send an enquiryWe reply from a real inbox, not a marketing sequence.
Questions we get asked.
How much does a Snowflake audit cost?
A Blue Thread Snowflake environment audit starts at £10,000 for the Starter tier (under $100k/yr Snowflake spend), £20,000 for Growth ($100k–$250k/yr), £30,000 for Scale ($250k–$500k/yr), and is scoped per engagement for Enterprise ($500k+/yr). Fixed-fee — no scope creep, no hourly overage. The tier is set on the discovery call based on your Snowflake spend.
How long does a Snowflake audit take?
The audit runs as a five-day sprint (Monday to Friday) at the Starter tier. Growth is two weeks, Scale is three weeks, Enterprise is scoped per engagement. The report is on your desk by 3pm on the final Friday, with a 90-minute readout workshop the same day.
What access do you need to our Snowflake account?
A read-only monitoring role, scoped to metadata and query history. No production data, no row-level access, no writes. We help you provision it before the sprint starts and audit the SQL we run against it.
Do you see our data?
No. Aperture reads Snowflake's metadata and query history — table shapes, warehouse usage, access grants, freshness signals. It never reads rows out of your tables.
How much time will my team spend on this?
Around four hours across the week. One hour of pre-work to provision access, a short kick-off, the day-four report review, and the day-five workshop. The consultant does the rest.
What if we don't find the savings you expected?
The scorecard is definitive on cost, security, freshness and usefulness — it will find something. If the recoverable value comes in below the sprint fee, we credit the difference toward whatever you want us to do next.
Do you fix things too, or just diagnose?
Both, if you want. Remediation is an optional retainer — separate from the audit and quoted separately. Plenty of clients take the roadmap and run it in-house, and we tell you where that will work.
How is this different from Select.dev, Keebo or Bluesky?
Those are cost tools that sell a monthly subscription. Aperture is a broader audit — cost, security, freshness, data usefulness — sold as a fixed-fee sprint with a consultant. Different scope, different deliverable, different sale.
Do we have to install anything?
No. Aperture runs from Blue Thread's environment against your Snowflake read-only role. Nothing to deploy, nothing to maintain after the sprint.
Which currency do you invoice in?
We publish and invoice in GBP by default. USD or EUR invoicing can be arranged on request — the total is fixed in GBP at contract signing and converted at the spot rate on the invoice date. Snowflake capacity-commit customers can pay a future subscription tier in their commit currency via Snowflake Marketplace.
Can we pay via our existing Snowflake capacity commit?
For the sprint fee, no — Snowflake's Marketplace Capacity Drawdown programme explicitly excludes professional services. For a continuous-monitoring subscription after the audit, yes — that will list on Snowflake Marketplace and can be paid from your capacity commit.