From Budget Pressures to Deeper Snowflake Adoption: How Artlist Freed Resources to Power New Initiatives
Artlist, a leading SaaS creative technology company, leveraged Seemore Data to enhance data observability, streamline workflows and optimize Snowflake costs.
30% Cost Reduction
3 wasteful pipelines flagged
$7,300 Instantly Saved
from one dashboard alone
$2,000 Saved
by killing one unused table
50% Run-Time Reduction
on a stuck process
30 min onboarding
with full stack integration
Challenges solved for Artlist
2.5 million+ high-quality, royalty-free digital assets
USA, UK & Israel
700+ employees
26 million users
2 teams, 23 engineers, 800% team growth in 3 years
Since its launch in 2016, Artlist has experienced rapid growth, which placed immense pressure on its expanding data team, with key challenges including:
- Data Engineering Bottlenecks: Rapid expansion led to tight timelines and shortcuts in best practices when using tools like Tableau, Airflow, and Snowflake.
- Growth in Complex Data Pipelines: Difficulties in understanding data pipelines, business metric calculations, and data transformations due to a lack of comprehensive data lineage tools.
- Dependency on Engineering: Non-technical users, such as analysts, frequently needed to consult the engineering team to understand data constructions, causing delays.
Seemore Data was integrated across Artlist’s data stack to complete visibility into their data
processes, optimization recommendations and step-by-step instructions that provide continuous cost and efficiency control.
Complete Lineage Visibility
Allows the data team to plan, troubleshoot, communicate and optimize the performance of every data asset at every level — from query to data product.
Optimization Recommendations
Real-time anomaly detection and instant root-cause analysis proactively identify and
eliminate inefficiencies in data management and usage.
Following a seamless 30-minute onboarding process to all tools on their data stack, Artlist quickly saw substantial improvements from the get go:
Optimized Pipelines:
- $2,000 (approx) saved annually after unused datatable being refreshed every hour was identified and shut down.
- $7,300 reduction of the annual cost of one dashboard after Seemore Data suggested adding a clustering column to their touchpoint table. A modified MERGE INTO statement was then used to update rows only when changes are detected.
- 30% reduction in costs after the detection of three pipelines consuming excessive resources due to improperly written Snowflake queries.
Improved Data Understanding:
Enabled non-technical users to see data flows and understand business metric calculations
without needing to consult the engineering team.
Streamlined Data Operations:
The Seemore Data dashboard allowed for real-time insights into workflows, significantly
reducing the time required to identify and resolve inefficiencies.
Smoother Data Team Onboarding:
New data team members gain a better understanding of our data pipelines as it is easy to understand data flows using Seemore Data and optimize them thanks to the insights it provides.
Artlist plans to expand the use of Seemore Data beyond the analytics team to include business
stakeholders. This will allow stakeholders to understand data constructions and their impacts on costs, facilitating better decision-making and prioritization of tasks.
The efficiencies and cost savings we’ve gained from working with Seemore Data allowed us to redirect resources into expanding our data ecosystem in ways that were not possible before.
For example:
- Snowflake’s Streamlit dashboards for internal stakeholders – We’ve been able to build and scale interactive data applications on top of Snowflake. This has significantly improved transparency and decision-making across teams (product, marketing, and finance), since they now get real-time, self-service insights instead of relying on static reports.
- Experimentation with new tools and architectures – Cost savings gave us room to invest in testing and adopting new technologies such as Kafka + Snowflake integrations, Snowpipe Streaming, and event-driven validation systems. This helps us move faster in data ingestion, monitoring, and reliability.
- Stronger data infrastructure – We reinvested in improving monitoring and observability with Seemore Data for Snowflake workloads, including credit cost analysis and data ingestion tracking. This has driven better governance and more efficient scaling of our operations.
The integration of Seemore Data has proven to be a game-changer for Artlist, offering enhanced
data visibility, significant cost savings, and improved workflow efficiency. By continuing to leverage Seemore Data, Artlist is well-positioned to sustain its rapid growth while maintaining optimal data management practices.