Should You Pay More for dbt Cloud?

As an analytics engineer, I used to support our in-house CLI implementation. We created tons of documentation and defined processes for analysts to follow, but I often found myself on the receiving end of time-sensitive support requests.

My engineering productivity wavered, and my manager often asked: why can’t you make this process easier for our growing team?

User Experience

When my team didn’t have the option to use dbt Cloud, we dealt with the complexity of our in-house infrastructure. Our analysts selected a free IDE (most chose VS Code) and had to become proficient with command-line workflows.

Analysts got frustrated when they couldn’t complete their tasks because of some vague command line error or a failure in the CI/CD checks.

I turned into a sounding board for people who hated the process.

But the problems disappeared when we implemented dbt Cloud. Productivity and job satisfaction hit an all-time high. dbt Cloud was created and designed to provide a straightforward user experience. Its first goal was to make dbt accessible to analysts at every level of technical agility.

I was surprised by how easily every person on my team could create models and work independently. One contributing factor is how dbt Cloud seamlessly integrates with source control. Using its UI is much easier than interacting with source control on the command line.

The learning curve for dbt Cloud is also small, which is valuable if your team will be growing or changing.

I can’t imagine telling a team that’s grown accustomed to the efficiency of dbt Cloud to start using multiple new applications AND the command line.

To do the exact same tasks.

Let’s revisit the question about how much money you might save and add a few more considerations to the equation:

1. Are your data consumers easy-going when something goes wrong with your ELT process?
2. Can critical business decisions be made if the data is stale?
3. Can you afford to put your project work on hold when you need to support problems in the custom workflow or user onboarding?
4. Does your team enjoy changes that make existing processes more complex?

If the answer to all four questions is yes, then replacing dbt Cloud might be a fun project to start the new year!

Proceed with Caution

When evaluating the benefits of dbt Cloud holistically, the recent price increase is insignificant. In fact, I would argue that dbt Cloud was priced too low from the start.

A few users have pointed out that no new functionality has been added.

To this, I’d argue that dbt Labs has grown their internal infrastructure to support enterprise-quality hosting for a much larger customer base than they likely anticipated in 2020 when the product launched. The price had to go up eventually.

Would you prefer a reliable product or a lower price point?

As an engineer, I love building things and solving problems. If I didn’t have as much experience with custom solutions before working in dbt Cloud, I might consider implementing an in-house workflow too.

But after supporting dozens of analysts on custom platforms for way too long, I do not want to build and maintain something that smarter people than me have already built and are better positioned to support.

I have far more important problems to solve at work.

I'm sure that you do too.