Cloud data platforms with consumption-based pricing like Snowflake are a critical enabler of advanced analytics, but costs can unexpectedly rack up. Capital One’’s Slingshot saves money by monitoring data warehouse performance, making optimization recommendations, and automating governance, and the bank is betting that other firms will be willing to shell out for its battle-tested software. 

Capital One realized that having its different lines of business individually manage their own Snowflake compute requests and configuration led to unexpected costs, so it built and used Slingshot over the last several years to streamline Snowflake’s provisioning processes. It has decreased its cost-per-query by 43% using the tool. 

Slingshot is the first public release of its new B2B software business, but the bank plans to launch other products in the future.  

“We recognize that many other businesses are facing similar data management needs … so bringing some of the tools we’’ve built and scaled to market as enterprise B2B software solutions is a natural evolution for us,”” said the head of Capital One Software, Ravi Raghu, in a press release.  

$4.2 billion ThoughtSpot has spent the last few months successfully using the tool to “optimize usage and control costs,” it said in the release.  Other tools to help businesses manage, monitor, and optimize their Snowflake use include WhereScape, DataDog, and BryteFlow.