dbt State now available free forever
Last edited on Oct 20, 2026
We built dbt State to enable all dbt users to simplify their orchestration, iterate faster in development (both locally or in platform), and optimize cost and time on dbt-related warehouse compute.
Now that dbt State is GA, we want to make trying it as easy as possible. Starting today, dbt State has a free plan for when your free trial period ends. If you self-host dbt, and you turn dbt State on, you can keep using a monthly allowance indefinitely, no card, no contract. For most dbt platform users, a monthly allowance will be added, and stays in effect until March, 2027. See more details here.
The dbt community is the driving force of what makes dbt the standard for data transformation. dbt is used across the industry, not just because it's an amazing tool, but because of the community of people constantly iterating on the framework and making it better. In so many ways, dbt State is the future of how you should run dbt—an intelligent backend that considers what happened on previous builds to shape what happens next.
By creating an indefinite free option for dbt State, we hope to open up these capabilities to every dbt user. All dbt users should be able to experience the benefits of dbt State, and these same users should be able to drive the feedback loop that will make dbt State an even better product in the future.
Since we announced dbt State in early June in public preview, we heard from early users and the dbt community that they’d love to try dbt State with less risk: not having to think about what happens after a free trial ends or undo the configurations that optimized state for their specific deployment. Setting dbt State up thoughtfully to get dbt projects that are often heavily customized (e.g. testing it in staging or dev before moving to production, tuning lag_tolerance, applying other configurations) can take fine tuning.
Important reminder:
You can use dbt State everywhere: production, staging, dev;
You can use dbt State anywhere: self-hosted dbt (1.7+, v2), dbt platform, Airflow, Dagster, and more.
dbt State works on Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and Redshift. Regardless of where you use dbt State, it requires a dbt account, because dbt State is a separate service that shares the state between different dbt runs, and charges on reuse via a metric called DATT (Daily Active Target Tables): one model or test that dbt State skips or clones in a day, counted once no matter how often it’s reused that day.
How the free tier works
Here's what happens if you sign up today:
- You sign up and enable dbt State. Your trial starts. dbt account required, but no payment method necessary.
- At trial end, your account moves to the free tier automatically. You get the full 1,000 DATT allowance for that month, trial usage doesn't count against it.
- Every month on the 1st, your allowance resets.
- Whenever you decide you want more than 1,000 DATT a month, you can:
- Add a credit card to pay-as-you-go and your usage past the allowance is billed at the DATT rate.
- Talk to us about an upfront commit, which allows for more flexible pricing and purchase options through Cloud Marketplaces.
If you're a dbt platform user, you’ll receive an allowance of 2,000 DATT a month through March 2027. You don't have to do anything to claim it. The next time you look at your usage, you'll see it there.
See how dbt State changes the way users work
Simplify deployment
"We've been able to simplify our previous setup down to one run, which is amazing, because it's a very clean deployment. Everybody knows what's going to run. There's no confusion." — Brett Petersen, Director of Data and Metrics, Custom Ink
Save time in development
"Now you just dbt build --select what you're working on. dbt compares against prod state, reuses every fresh upstream at zero compute, and rebuilds only your change. The whole chain resolves in seconds. No clone command, no waiting, no dev-environment ritual, the state tracking you used to do in your head is now the tool's job. It saves so much development time." — Mykkel Rydal, Lead Data Engineer, Joe & The Juice
Free up capacity
"dbt State created a paradigm shift in how we work. With capacity freed up, freshness codified, and simpler, yet smarter orchestration, we can focus on initiatives that add value to our business. And that's on top of the 25% savings on both job run time and data warehouse compute costs." — Gordon Curzon, Head of Analytics Engineering and Data Modeling, Virgin Media O2
Get started today
If you're on dbt and you haven't turned dbt State on yet, now is the moment. Point dbt State at your project, run a job twice, watch the reuse stack up in the logs, and keep going.
There are several resources to help you get started:
- dbt State docs setup
- dbt Learn course on dbt State
- On-demand technical deep dive with Senior DX Advocate Joel Labes
Talk to the dbt State team
We hope this gets you excited to get started on dbt State and to optimize your dbt runs. We’re hosting Ask the Experts: dbt State webinars globally from October, 21 to October 23, so sign up, bring your questions and get them answered by the people who built dbt State.
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