Most enterprises know exactly what their Snowflake bill is. Almost none have calculated what they spend keeping the pipes clean. That second number is usually bigger, and unlike the platform cost, most of it is structurally avoidable. The hidden cost stack This is what large enterprises with significant data infrastructure investment are actually spending. A note on the Gartner data quality figure: the $12.9,15M
Most enterprises know exactly what their Snowflake bill is. Almost none have calculated what they spend keeping the pipes clean. That second number is usually bigger, and unlike the platform cost, most of it is structurally avoidable. The hidden cost stack This is what large enterprises with significant data infrastructure investment are actually spending. A note on the Gartner data quality figure: the $12.9,15M
Enterprise data teams now spend 53% of their time maintaining pipelines, not building data products. That’s not a talent problem. It’s a structural one. And in 2026, the structure has finally changed. Right now, somewhere in your data estate, something is not working that nobody knows about yet. It will surface, in a dashboard, a board pack, or a business decision made on numbers