[HN Gopher] DBT Cloud increase Team plan price by 100% and limit...
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DBT Cloud increase Team plan price by 100% and limit features at
the same time
 
Author : unklefolk
Score  : 88 points
Date   : 2022-12-15 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
 
web link (www.getdbt.com)
w3m dump (www.getdbt.com)
 
| pbowyer wrote:
| Can someone do a better job than the dbt homepage and explain
| what this is and _why I would need it?_ The pictures show SQL
| being generated using a templating language - when do I want
| that?
| 
| From the other comments it's clearly popular but I've never come
| across it in use.
 
  | Aeolun wrote:
  | I guess it's a way to stop former dba's and etl people from
  | just storing their queries/stored procedures all over the
  | place?
 
| scosman wrote:
| My take on raising prices (ran this playbook twice now, once at
| my company, once with a company I'm an angel in):
| 
| - Grandfather in old users for as long as you can. Forever if
| it's feasible. More than likely future customer revenue >>>
| current customer revenue so it's not worth burning goodwill.
| Don't go past this point unless you have a really good reason.
| 
| - If you absolutely need to increase prices for current
| customers, the warning should be long (6mo+). If people want to
| leave, they shouldn't feel rushed, and they should have time to
| put migrating off on their roadmap. More time also helps
| goodwill.
| 
| - Give several automatic extensions of ~1 month after initial
| deadline. No matter how many times you email, some people won't
| read them. This has a few benefits. 1) extensions help pick up
| some users who would have churned. They might miss deadline 1,
| but you can pick up an extra 10-15% on an extension. 2) It give
| you something to point to when the price increase hits and they
| contact support ("we told you 4 times, and extended it twice
| already"). It's not perfect, but it helps. Be sure to send an
| automatic email when you extend. 3) People will leave it to the
| last minute, and migrating off might take longer than planned.
| Blanket extensions reduce the number of panicked manual
| extensions, and lower manual support load.
| 
| - Be willing to give a manual extensions of a fixed time for
| those who raise a stink to support. Messaging can be "we'll give
| you a 4th extension of 3 months, but this is really the last
| one". Let the support team grant these without any approval to
| lower management overhead. It makes most people happy, but more
| importantly, it spreads out the anger over a longer time.
| 
| Ultimately, the steps above will slightly increase uptake, but
| dramatically reduce the chance of ending up on the front page of
| hacker news. The latter is more important, it's burning chances
| with future customers.
| 
| Mailchimp's Mandrill is still the worst case I've ever seen.
| Cheap to host product, increased prices dramatically, with
| minimal warning, no opt in, and unsympathetic tone from C-suite.
| People don't forget when companies act like this. Also: don't use
| Mailchimp.
 
  | dijit wrote:
  | > Also: don't use Mailchimp.
  | 
  | Noted.
  | 
  | Alternatives that you rate?
 
    | Aeolun wrote:
    | I switched (back) to Sendgrid and I haven't needed anything
    | else since.
 
    | scosman wrote:
    | Since it was price driven we went with AWS SES. We were high-
    | volume low-value per email. A high-value low-volume use case
    | might have better options. I've heard good things about
    | sendgrid. Someone who gives a damn about delivery rate.
 
    | podoman wrote:
    | checkout https://loops.so
 
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Long time dbt user since early days, 2018. I started on git ci/cd
| and orchestration or runs via airflow. I'm sure there are even
| easier ways to do it these days.
| 
| I'm hoping the silver lining is that more of the "less technical"
| business folks referenced in the announcement who were willing to
| pay $50/seat but not $100 will actually upskill, set up their own
| orchestration and development process, and end up not paying dbt
| together.
 
| AnEro wrote:
| Only reason I'm kinda _okay_ with this is because of the open
| source side is still strong. It 's 90% of the features needed for
| a product, but the cloud offering is the same 90% but better for
| teams bigger than 3 and larger organizations.
| 
| I genuinely think that this pricing increase is justifiable, and
| also will spark more competition to DBT Cloud's features in the
| open source space to get select cloud features. Since they are
| objectively forcing out a large amount of small teams and start-
| ups
| 
| For instance, I was planning to organize the data side of my
| consulting side there, but it doesn't make sense to do that
| anymore. So if someone's doing that now, it Christmas is gunna be
| fun switching over to your own solutions
 
  | Ftuuky wrote:
  | We use at this company the open source dbt for multiple teams,
  | all bigger than 3, just fine.
 
| tehalex wrote:
| We had to abandon DBT cloud because it was very feature limited -
| it does the basics well though, so is a good starting point for
| most, but seems like it's easy to outgrow.
| 
| The new metrics feature is tied to DBT cloud - probably because
| that is the only way they could get bigger users to get value
| from their hosted product and not just DIY it. (offering a
| largely propitiatory feature). However, I don't know what the
| uptake of the metrics feature is - it seems half baked to me.
 
| oxfordmale wrote:
| In a recession you learn who your true strategic partners are. It
| is fair enough that prices need to be increased in line with
| cost, however, a 100% increase with one month notice is #@#**. In
| our case it would be a 600% increase as this forces us onto the
| enterprise plan. Budgets for 2023 have already been agreed this
| late in the year, so this is a hard sell to the C suite.
| 
| Our conclusion is that we can't rely on DBT cloud. What is
| stopping them from doing this again next year?
| 
| DBT is a great tool, however, in the end it is just a Ninja
| templating engine. I have build something similar myself in the
| past, and for now I can just use dbt-core with VsCode.
 
  | pixiemaster wrote:
 
    | [deleted]
 
  | datalopers wrote:
  | What is their cloud offering if it's just sql templating? Why
  | would anyone pay for that?
 
    | tehalex wrote:
    | Most people will just use the sql templating and scheduled
    | cron jobs features of the cloud, which is very easy to self
    | host.
    | 
    | There is cloud IDE, which is just ok in my opinion. I'd
    | rather use a local editor, but might be a value add for some.
    | 
    | The cloud plans also has metadata features and APIs, which
    | could be worth it for some use cases.
    | 
    | The most interesting thing tied to the cloud is the new
    | metrics feature, but I don't really like how it's done
    | (metrics are defined as sql fragments in YAML). Really using
    | metrics depends on proprietary parts that dbt cloud only has,
    | so if you are using this, you'll probably be paying for the
    | cloud.
    | 
    | [1] https://docs.getdbt.com/docs/use-dbt-semantic-layer/dbt-
    | sema...
 
| moltar wrote:
| If anyone wants to self host a robust dbt workflow on AWS - dm
| me. I have a solid infra as code (AWS CDK) solution that accounts
| for a lot of functionality, including hosting generated docs.
 
| purpleblue wrote:
| Doubling prices in the face of a recession, especially where tech
| companies are cutting back is undoubtably a company-killing
| decision.
| 
| How many months from now will there be a "I take full
| responsibility for these 25% layoffs" email?
 
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Never heard of DBT before so can't comment on that. However, I
| think the decision to do the increase at once seems kinda "fair".
| I mean they could've just raised by 10 every year were most
| people might say "oh it's only 10 bucks, so no big deal..." till
| they creepingly hit the 100 as well. At least they are upfront.
 
| ccn0p wrote:
| all just part of building a sustainable business in a rapidly
| shifting climate from "growth at all costs" to "break even as
| fast as possible".
 
| thenipper wrote:
| > "Drew and Connor and I came to that decision with literally
| zero analytical rigor--we just wanted to unlock the analytics
| engineering workflow to as many humans as possible"
| 
| Give me a break...
 
  | [deleted]
 
  | FlyingSnake wrote:
  | I have seven words for you: "I...love...goolibib's integrated
  | multi-platform functionality!"
 
| unklefolk wrote:
| Price will go up from $50 to $100 per seat. Now can only have 8
| seats instead of 40 seats and only 1 project instead of unlimited
| projects.
 
  | nerpderp82 wrote:
  | Charging on a per-project basis puts an arbitrary distinction
  | on how customer's should structure their work. I thought we
  | were over having the top level folder structure be a driver for
  | pricing?
 
| cristiandima wrote:
| I appreciate the no bs hn submission title, it made me click the
| link just so I can read and laugh at the PR approved title.
| 
| I was not disappointed: "Updating dbt Cloud pricing to support
| long-term community growth" - though I reckon they could have
| gotten "journey" in there as well.
 
  | muraiki wrote:
  | lol, they actually put it as a zinger at the end of the
  | announcement:
  | 
  | > Thanks, as always, for being a part of this journey.
  | 
  | I have to say, the tone and execution of this announcement has
  | killed all interest I had in dbt. I don't want to have to
  | explain company behavior like this to my boss when proposing
  | the use of a new tool.
 
| schipplock wrote:
| who?
 
| nodesocket wrote:
 
  | wpietri wrote:
  | I can see two reasons to make a comment like this. One, you
  | think that there is somebody here who has not heard of the free
  | market before. The other is to preempt criticism of a material
  | change in pricing. Neither makes any sense to me. One can't
  | have free markets without free speech.
 
    | nodesocket wrote:
 
      | wpietri wrote:
      | Then what's the point of your comment? Did you sincerely
      | think that somebody here didn't know that markets work
      | through customers deciding what to buy?
 
    | tshaddox wrote:
    | Also "free market" doesn't mean "you don't get to make any
    | value judgements about any decisions made in the market."
    | Quite the opposite, in fact.
 
| beckingz wrote:
| Based on the public posts I've seen about enterprise prices, for
| many teams this will mean a 600%+ per seat increase if they have
| more than 8 developers.
| 
| Which makes sense because dbtLabs has a bunch of venture funding
| and is trying to monetize their community and open source
| package, but is rough for organizations that want to encourage
| their analysts to move towards engineering levels of quality.
 
| vorpalhex wrote:
| One of the reasons they want to increase price is because they
| have new features.
| 
| Yet not every customer uses every new feature. Indeed, features
| are often used to bring in new customers. Sally wants eg live
| metrics, Bob needs a specific kind of weekly report.
| 
| Now Acme co wants to increase the price to both Sally and Bob
| since there are more features, but Sally and Bob each only use a
| single feature.
| 
| The other issue is that two critical features for dbt are under
| more expensive plans - SSO and api access. This sours the lower
| plans by quite a bit. Even as a solo dev, I use SSO!
 
| dennisy wrote:
| I am using DBT and I think this is quite unfair, mainly because
| we have recently introduced this and have built on it quite a
| bit. Removal of DBT is now a big job, so I think using this
| knowledge and doubling prices does not seem fair.
| 
| Also Google have their own version of this, which for those who
| are using GCP and BigQuery could mean an easier which...
 
  | thenipper wrote:
  | You know you can self host it if you need to.
 
  | CompeAnansi wrote:
  | Yeah, don't trash that work. Just use DBT core instead. You can
  | call DBT runs from Airflow jobs quite easily.
 
| richwater wrote:
| > We actually get community members reaching out to us concerned
| that we are under-charging them because they want our business to
| be successful!
| 
| My sides. Give me a fucking break.
| 
| Also, forcing any group who wants more than 8 licenses onto
| Enterprise? Laughable.
 
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(page generated 2022-12-15 23:01 UTC)