🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, fantastic. Just what my Q3 budget needed: the ability to “Explore with AI” from a browser tab. I can already hear the cha-ching of a thousand GPU instances spinning up because a marketing intern asked our new data platform, “What’s the meaning of life, but like, for our Q2 sales numbers?” Truly, a revolutionary leap forward for our expense reports.

And what’s this little gem? “Time Series and Playgrounds bring back the flexibility of Classic, improved for Forward.” Improved. Let me translate that from Vendor-ese to English: “We deprecated the old version you were perfectly happy with, deliberately removed features, and are now graciously selling them back to you as an ‘improvement’ in our new, mandatory platform.” It’s not an upgrade; it’s a ransom note with better kerning. This whole “Forward” business smells less like progress and more like a forced march off a financial cliff.

They sell you on the dream of writing SQL in a browser, as if our engineers are just dying to trade their finely-tuned local environments for a text box that probably hangs if you look at it wrong. But let’s not get distracted by the shiny features. Let’s do some quick back-of-the-napkin math, shall we? I like to call this the Goldman TCO—the True Cost of Obfuscation.

First, the sticker price. They’ll show you a lovely, simple pricing page. Probably something with smiling cartoon animals and tiers named “Sprout,” “Grow,” and “Basically Your Entire Series B Funding.” But that’s just the cover charge.

The real party starts here:

• The “Forward” Migration: Oh, it’s just a simple migration, they’ll say. My numbers say that’s a minimum of 600 engineer-hours to untangle every API call, every data pipeline, and every dashboard we painstakingly built on “Classic.” At a blended rate, that’s a cool $90,000 in productivity we can just light on fire. And that’s before we bring in the inevitable consultants they “highly recommend” to ensure a “seamless transition.” Add another $75,000 for a team of people named Chad who will spend six weeks producing a 200-slide PowerPoint about our “data journey.”
• The AI Fun Tax: That little “Explore with AI” button isn’t free, darling. It’s powered by what I’m sure are called “Synaptic Thought Units” or some other nonsense, billed per thousandth of a second. The “Playground” is where my developers get to discover, through trial and error, exactly how to rack up a $50,000 overage bill in a single afternoon while “prototyping innovative solutions.”
• Retraining & Unlearning: The team now has to be trained on the “new, improved” workflow. That’s another week of lost productivity for the entire data team. We’ll call it a $40,000 team-building exercise in collective frustration.

So, let’s tally it up. A modest base license of, say, $100,000 a year, plus $165,000 in migration and consulting fees, plus a conservative $50,000 AI “oopsie” fund, plus $40,000 in retraining. Our “simple browser-based solution” is now a $355,000 Year-One adventure.

They’ll promise a 300% ROI, based on “developer velocity” and “synergistic data insights.” My napkin here shows a 300% increase in our cloud services bill and a Q4 where we have to choose between paying for this “Playground” and keeping the lights on. I wonder how you amortize “synergy” on a balance sheet. It certainly doesn’t pay the bills.

Anyway, this has been a profoundly enlightening two minutes. Thank you, Tinybird, for the reminder that the most valuable data tool I have is the delete button. I’ll be cheerfully unsubscribing now.