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Posted

Microsoft is selling Databricks as an Azure service, so if you have a MARC commit for your tenant, this might be a better path to allocate the spend.  If you're not quite there yet, but also running a Microsoft shop, you'll have to get used to their Fabric SKUs now for Azure SQL and PowerBI.  Their legacy pricing models can no longer be written into new EAs. 

 

Posted
On 3/6/2025 at 1:16 AM, blacklab said:

They are going to get $200k less out of us next year compared to this year.

I've never dealt with a bigger bunch of assholes in my life. Our data loads vary every month, some months we do a bunch of stuff and some months hardly any. Our bills range from $5k to $40k. Every year they insist we sign a minimum $20k per month deal. It would cost us $100k extra a year to do so. Every year they insist we can't be a customer unless we sign this deal. Every year I say ok, we'll give you a choice, We won't sign a deal and we'll spend $200k, or we'll spend $0. Every year same song and dance. 

Last year they insisted we have a meeting about our contract renewal. I told them no, just send the fucking contract over and I'll sign it. They refused and said it was very complicated and we had to have a meeting. I then sat through 40 minutes of a complete idiot saying the same shit over and over about how they are AI this and AI that. His slideshow had 3 different colored themes, with slides saying the same shit. He had no idea on any question I asked him.

I then spent the next 20 minutes listening to a sales douche tell me that "you guys can't continue to be a customer unless you sign a $20k a month minimum. I've talked to finance and they will not let you guys continue on month to month". Finally I asked him would they rather have $200k in revenue or $0. He hemmed and hawed and then said his guy in finance won't allow him to do anything less than $20k minimum. I asked for the finance guys name so I could talk to him. He refused. I told him I guess we're done here, we'll find an alternative, please go tell your finance guy you lost a $200k in revenue and you both can high five each other about sticking it to us as you pack up your shit from your desk when you get fired.

The next day I got an email from their VP in charge of small business who asked if we could talk. A few days later we met and I went off about how the sales guy was a complete douche, our loads vary so any minimum per month completely fucks us, we had not opened a support ticket in two years so we were pure profit for them, we don't want to meet with them ever yet every sales douche we've had has annoyed the fuck out of us about meetings we don't want to have and we just want to be left alone and we'll spend another $200k next year with them.

He was actually pretty cool and apologized for the douche and let us keep our $1k a month minimum deal and promised to leave us alone. Every quarter I put retire databricks as my number 1 priority in the quarterly plan, one of these quarters we will actually do it. We did retire one product that was 50% of our bill so we are at lease heading in the right direction.

We did roll our own server with https://github.com/lakehq/sail and have run some of our code on it with success, we'll probably move everything over in the next year and finally tell them to fuck off for good.

So to answer your question, they really don't bring a lot to the table. AWS has a competing product, and if a dumbshit like me can roll my own sail server in a couple of hours and save $200k a year I really don't think they are going to be heading in the right direction.  Every person I have dealt with there other than the VP of small biz/startups has been a complete douche who acted as though they were doing us a favor by letting us be a customer. Their software is way way overpriced as they charge on a cpu/time usage basis so we end up paying them more than any other vendor besides AWS which causes my bosses to always ask if we can get rid of them. 

 

 

Reading this thread really resonated with me. I’ve been on the purchasing side of enterprise SaaS many times and know firsthand how frustrating it is to deal with exploitative contracts and sales reps who act like they're doing you a favor while bleeding you dry.

The ones who only check in once a year at renewal time, asking, "How has your experience been?" but really meaning, "It's time to increase your minimum spend so I can get a bigger commission," drive me nuts. Then they claim the contract terms are out of their control...

@blacklab, your experience with the $1K to $20K monthly minimum jump and those AI-themed slideshow meetings sounds all too familiar.

If anyone wants to chat about their setup or about slashing their bill, I’m Shehab, co-founder of LakeSail (https://github.com/lakehq/sail). Feel free to reach out at shehab@lakesail.com if that's easier.

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