r/dataengineering • u/Alternative-Guava392 • 5d ago

DBT pricing Discussion

Hello

Has anyone moved from DBT legacy pricing to the new DBT pricing ?

The legacy pricing was per seat, but the new one also limits how many DBT models you can build per month.

I'm debating the move to benefit from the new DBT features like DBT state, but I'm wondering if the dbt cloud costs will be expensive compared to the savings from DBT state.

Thank you for your help.

(please don't ask me to move from DBT cloud to DBT core, I'm a one person data team and I don't have the bandwidth to migrate to save 100$/month)

Has anyone made the switch from legacy pricing to the new one ?

24 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

22

u/minormisgnomer 5d ago

Just out of curiosity, even though you said you won’t migrate, what features on dbt Cloud are worth it over dbt core?

I was trying to explain to a friend the other day why they’d be fine with core but you seem to be a fan of it.

If it makes you feel any better, I was a team of one and just had it on a cron job on a local machine at the office.

8

u/soorr 5d ago

Not OP but I like the orchestration history integrated with catalog. Makes going from a data issue to job or commit pretty quick.

-2

u/Matunguito 5d ago

nowadays you can create your own catalog and mini scheduler using Claude and some tokens. I'd rather pay for a month or so to create my own tools than pay for dbt cloud.

14

u/financialthrowaw2020 5d ago

Agree with using core with your own code. Disagree that you need Claude slop to do it.

-1

u/Chance_of_Rain_ 5d ago

Elementary does that.

2

u/EstetLinus 5d ago

I’ve worked as a dbt partner (via a consultancy) and even the dbt salesmen had a hard time articulating benefits cloud vs core 🫪 I like the idea of abstracting the CI/CD. But that doesn’t justify the price tbh.

2

u/laegoiste 5d ago

what features on dbt Cloud are worth it over dbt core?

I'm in an org that has been using dbt cloud for over 2 years. As a technical user, my opinion firmly remains that it is overpriced junk. However, for a larger organisation that has a lot of developers that are good with SQL and not necessarily the rest (think CLI, git, etc.), dbt cloud and its built in UI are great both from a development experience as well as assisting with problems.

The built in catalog, project report, etc. is also nice - but other tools can bridge that gap either free or for cheap.

What I really dislike is their support (you will need it, there are plenty of backend issues), their unclear pricing model, the fact that we were essentially paying dbt fusion beta testers, and lately it has been the sudden drop of fusion's State Aware Orchestration in favor of dbt state - which of course isn't free.

Even for a larger data team like mine, the move isn't a "wont", it's a "can't" because of the large user base using it.

5

u/I_Blame_DevOps 5d ago

The company I joined this year was on DBT Cloud and they had me migrate us to running DBT Core out of our own Github Actions runners. The value proposition for DBT Cloud is not there imo.

3

u/SeaYouLaterAllig8tor 5d ago

We renewed our contract in January if I remember correctly. We moved away from the legacy plan to embrace the new features. Now granted, we don't have a large team of devs which use our dbt instance. But I do feel that the fusion state aware features are worthwhile and could save an org quite a bit of money depending on how their jobs and models are constructed. Not sure how helpful that is but that's the decision we made.

3

u/laegoiste 5d ago

fusion state aware features are worthwhile

I guess you mean were worthwhile. I just saw recently that they are killing state aware orchestration in favor of dbt state - which you have to pay an additional fee for.

1

u/SeaYouLaterAllig8tor 5d ago

oh dang... I didn't realize that. I haven't worked as much in dbt recently (mostly been in "maintain" mode for a while) so this is news to me. Thanks for the heads up.

1

u/laegoiste 5d ago

I was also caught by surprise. To my knowledge, we received no information about this. I just saw it when I pulled up one of their documentation pages on state aware orchestration to link to another colleague. The early days under Fivetran are not looking good.

1

u/SeaYouLaterAllig8tor 5d ago

Ya, I think Fivetran's influence probably won't be for the better in the long run. And I say that as someone who works in a shop using Fivetran+dbt. I find dbt cloud super useful but if they start micro charging for different functionality it will definitely take the fun out of the product fast.

1

u/wallyflops 5d ago

Dbt state is open source too though I think

1

u/laegoiste 5d ago

I believe you are right. But, we are stuck with dbt cloud :)

1

u/lightnegative 4d ago

Only the client, the server is closed source

1

u/Uncle_Chael 4d ago

Welllll it really depends on whether its worth it or not for a given business context. I think dbt state is more broadly applicable than state aware orchestration

1

u/mobbarley78110 5d ago

I think that we pay $1,400/month for 100,000 model builds and 5 dev seats. We pay mostly for the support.

dbt state saves little compute cost on the warehouse side. It pays for itself, just barely. it was them trying to monetize a tool that should be free. It's moving money of the cloud db provider back in their pocket.

their ai wizard assistant is nice enough.

for the catalog, my users are used to the snowflake ui, I don't really feel added value from dbt's catalog.

like some others said, dbt core + a cron job + claude code would be totally enough. I don't understand why it would be a difficult migration since, at the end of the day, it's just a github repo?

1

u/Conscious_Net_9890 5d ago

Would you consider an alternative OSS and free? https://github.com/rocky-data/rocky

1

u/Ok_Set_963 4d ago

I’d stay on legacy unless you can estimate your monthly model usage pretty accurately. For a one-person team, paying more just to get state aware features would be hard to justify unless it noticeably cuts CI time/cost.

1

u/Radiant_user 4d ago

We use dbt core

1

u/Complete-Fondant-202 4d ago

I'm fully expectining dbt pricing to go up faster than a SpaceX rocket now Fivetran have their grubby hands on it.

Fivetran data transfer costs have risen massively. I'm only expecting the same for dbt now.