dbt pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
dbt (getdbt.com) is a data pipeline tool. Per developer seat per month on Starter, with 15,000 successful models built included and usage-based overage; Enterprise is custom.. Free plan: Developer plan: 1 developer seat, 3,000 successful models built/month, 1 project.
What dbt costs
- ELT, 5M rows: not offered (dbt only transforms data already in the warehouse; it has no source connectors)
- CDP, 10k users: not offered (No event collection or reverse ETL)
- Models, 3 users: $300/mo (Starter $100/user/mo x 3 developers = $300; 3,000 models/mo is within the 15,000 included (free Developer plan allows only 1 seat))
Plan compared: Starter. Every price is for the same small company on the cheapest self-serve plan that fully covers the job, billed monthly: loading 5 million rows a month from Postgres and 4 SaaS apps into a warehouse (headline), getting data on 10,000 users into a warehouse and 2 business tools, or running 100 daily SQL models for a 3-person team. Free plans count when they cover the whole job; warehouse compute and free self-hosted open-source editions are not counted.
What dbt does
Core: SQL & dbt transformations, Open source & self-hosting.
Important: Pipeline orchestration (partly), Lineage & data observability, API & pipelines as code, AI pipeline assistant, Compliance & data residency (partly).
Also has: Lake & Iceberg destinations (partly), Data to spreadsheets (partly).
dbt price hikes
- dbt Cloud capped Team plan models at 15,000 a month, then $0.01 each · Aug 12, 2023
New Team (now Starter) plan customers get 15,000 successful models built per month, with each extra model billed at $0.01; legacy Team plans had unlimited models.
Alternatives to dbt
Other data pipeline tools at 5 million rows a month from 5 sources:
dbt alternatives: 3 data pipeline tools compared, at every size.
Other kinds of products that cover part of dbt
- PostHog (Analytics): covers 58% of dbt; missing or partial: SQL & dbt transformations (partly), Pipeline orchestration, Lineage & data observability (partly), API & pipelines as code (partly), AI pipeline assistant (partly)
- Supermetrics (Marketing reporting): covers 39% of dbt; missing or partial: SQL & dbt transformations, Open source & self-hosting, Pipeline orchestration, Lineage & data observability (partly), API & pipelines as code (partly)
- Amplitude (Analytics): covers 31% of dbt; missing or partial: SQL & dbt transformations, Open source & self-hosting (partly), Pipeline orchestration, Lineage & data observability, API & pipelines as code (partly)
Every change we logged
- Aug 12, 2023 · Limits cut: New Team (now Starter) plan customers get 15,000 successful models built per month, with each extra model billed at $0.01; legacy Team plans had unlimited models. The free Developer plan was capped at 3,000 models a month, with jobs paused at the limit.
Sources
Pricing page: getdbt.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices are from the official pricing page and PricingSaaS (Sep 2026); the 2023 change is from dbt's Aug 8, 2023 blog and its legacy-plan docs. The per-seat price change in that 2023 update (widely reported as $50 to $100) appeared only in an image and could not be verified, so it is not recorded; no web search was run (search budget used up).