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Saving Black Crow 57%: "It took us about 20 minutes to set up and see savings"

Case study
Published on
22 Oct 2025
"Snowflake is central to everything that we do. As we onboarded more partners and loaded more data, our Snowflake costs scaled dramatically"
“It took us about 20 minutes to get set up with Espresso and see savings."
"It's been a pleasure working with Espresso AI! Now we can keep scaling usage without increasing our budget."

Black Crow AI’s platform draws from billions of first‑party customer signals - Shopify orders, email clicks, SMS engagement – and transforms them into predictive scores and real-time experiences in milliseconds.

Headquarters
New York
Employees
51-200
Funding
Industry
CRM
"Thanks to Espresso AI, we were able to cut our Snowflake costs by over 50%. Their platform is seamless to set up and requires zero maintenance. If you're looking to rein in your data warehousing expenses, I highly recommend giving Espresso AI a try"
Phil René
VP Engineering

Founded in 2021, Black Crow AI’s platform draws from billions of first‑party customer signals - Shopify orders, email clicks, SMS engagement – and transforms them into predictive scores and real-time experiences in milliseconds.

Whether optimizing ad targeting, sparking repurchase flows, or fueling dynamic storefronts, Black Crow takes what once demanded a team of data scientists and distills it into one‑click integration. The result: hundreds of brands, including Marine Layer, Burrow, and Hugo Boss, now lean on real‑time intelligence that boosts acquisition by 25–50%, personalizes the shopper's path, and turns even the smallest interactions into precision‑timed conversions. 

Black Crow and Snowflake - indispensable, but increasingly expensive

Black Crow has been a Snowflake customer for 5 years. Snowflake powers everything from their analytics stack to their centralized data lake.

But as their data volumes grew, so did their spend:

“We use Snowflake to power business intelligence, analytics, logging - basically anything that involves metrics and our customer data. It’s central to everything we do. But as we onboarded more partners and loaded more data, our Snowflake costs scaled dramatically.”  - Phil René

Although the team experimented with cost-cutting measures like reducing usage and managing warehouse schedules manually, Snowflake’s rising prices and limited internal bandwidth made it difficult to keep costs under control.

Espresso AI’s 62% Savings Estimate

We first met Black Crow’s data team over pizza at our Williamsburg WeWork office, when Espresso was still in its earliest days. They soon became our third ever customer.

"It’s really easy. You just have to run a couple of queries to give permissions, and that’s pretty seamless,” said Phil. “It took us about 20 minutes to get set up and see our projected savings." - Phil René

One year later, Espresso has saved Black Crow over $190,000

“Espresso saves us over half on our Snowflake bill. That means we can keep scaling usage without increasing our budget.” - Phil René

The Black Crow team is lean and engineering capacity is always stretched, so outsourcing warehouse optimization to Espresso allows BlackCrow to focus on what matters to them most: delivering real-time intelligence to customers.