Data Infrastructure · sub-niche
Columnar warehouse alternatives.
Snowflake / BigQuery alternatives optimized for a specific shape — cheap, fast, or open.
Team-sized buildTrickle — one deal per quarter
Why now
Snowflake credits are too expensive for the long tail. Open lakehouse standards lower the switching cost.
What the signal looks like
Repos with Iceberg / Delta Lake support, query-optimizer libraries, and S3-native compute.
Public examples
We name publicprojects + categories only — never founders we track inside the paid product. The buyer’s edge stays inside the product.
- DuckDB / MotherDuck shape
- ClickHouse Cloud
- Tabular / Iceberg-native
What this displaces
A BigQuery bill that surprises every quarter.
Our build-vs-invest call
Heavy build. Fund only with prior database infra background. The wedge is a price-performance frontier.
Common questions about this niche
- Buyer?
- Data platform teams at $50M+ revenue companies.
- Pricing?
- Per TB scanned or per warehouse.
- Defensibility?
- Performance + cost + ecosystem.
More inside Data Infrastructure
- Vector database engines — Vector search engines optimized for specific workloads — high-dimensional, hybrid, or local.
- Real-time feature stores — Feature stores with sub-second freshness for online ML.
- Postgres extension marketplaces — Postgres is now the AI database. The extension ecosystem is the next platform.
- Change data capture tools — CDC pipelines that don't require a Kafka cluster.