Which services provider do you have in mind to pay? The advantage of Snowflake is that the CIO can pick Snowflake as the default for the entire org and it will work across a very large number of business use cases. I don't see any open source analytic software that can do that.
In my experience open source analytic solutions work much better for specific use cases, say network flow log analysis. You pick exactly the right set of components for that use case and build specifically to the problem. Maybe you use ClickHouse + Kafka--cheaper, simpler, faster. But when you shift to another problem, such as analyzing support case patterns, that requires unpredictable joins on large numbers of tables the first solution does not work at all. Now you need something like Presto on data lakes, which is completely different technology.
The alternative is to move all the data in to Snowflake and do both of the above use cases there. Sure, it's not the fastest or the cheapest software but the savings in labor more than make up for the licensing cost. A lot of companies make that decision.
We are talking about companies that do not even have a CIO, which is just another way to say "most companies".
other than the resources to evaluate the commodified open-source alternative. and the resources to manage the risk of that alternative, and the smaller company who runs it, going away.
"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is usually said in a snarky way, but there's real value in not only not having to think about the provider, but not having to think about which provider to choose. making that decision has a cost, and the more off the beaten path you go the higher the cost of that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg
How many startups simply died or how many projects never got to be launched because they thought they needed some enterprise support from the start?
Plenty of companies that would be fine by using a managed postgresql database for their "data warehouse" and you can get, e.g, one reasonably powerful server at Digital Ocean for $60/month with managed backups - and that already has quite a big markup compared to their droplets because they are just packaging some monitoring tools on top of their existing systems.
You are missing the "we could pay someone that provides a commodified, open-source alternative to Snowflake" option.
It would be cheaper, it wouldn't require any of your engineering team resources and it would help us all get rid of single vendor lock-in.