dbt Labs offers 45-day Enterprise free trial via Startup Perks program from Google Cloud

If your startup runs on Google Cloud, here’s great news: dbt Labs now offers a 45-day Enterprise trial for qualified startups. This exclusive Startup Perk unlocks access to dbt’s Enterprise license so you can build, test, and scale trusted analytics pipelines faster.

Who qualifies for the 45-day free dbt Enterprise trial for Google Cloud startups

The 45-day Enterprise license trial is exclusive to Scale Tier members of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. If you are interested in dbt, but are not in the Google for Startups Cloud Program or a Scale Tier member, you can sign up for a dbt 14-day free trial.

Why startups should choose dbt early to scale analytics and data governance

Startups face a pressure cooker of responsibility to manage resources wisely and create a return on investment for investors. As a data team leader, you play a pivotal role in implementing the central nervous system of your business, your data systems, while also meeting innovation demands by:

• Moving quickly
• Having a strong governance process
• Ensuring you have trusted data
• Being wise about using investor resources

Which means you also have to:

• Minimize tech debt and avoid making stack changes frequently or too late
• Attract top talent that is capable of doing all the above and doing it fast

Making the decision early about what goes into your tech stack will directly impact your ability to succeed. For those unfamiliar, dbt Labs is data’s great organizer. We pioneered the data analytics framework to transform bits of information into actionable data points for practitioners, teams, and businesses who rely on data they can trust.

We operate as the control plane for the analytics stack, continuously innovating the data engineering toolbox and the Analytics Development Lifecycle (ADLC) that defines the way data gets done for everything from dimensional models to novel AI.

Today, nearly 6,000 customers and a community of more than 100k members create less data work and more data that works. That translates to a lot of great knowledge and enthusiasm you can tap into for professional development and elevating your data playbook.

We are thrilled to be a partner in the Startup Perks program from Google Cloud and to partner with data teams at startups in their journey to success. With dbt’s rich feature set, innovative approach, and strong partnership with Google, thousands of organizations have adopted dbt as the essential playbook for their data teams.

How dbt ensures data governance and trusted analytics pipelines for startups

Innovation depends on trustworthy, well-governed data. You could fail if you attempt to be innovative without first setting governance and a method to trust the outputs of your data. Between managing investor resources and compressed timelines, it’s important not to skip the step of a good foundation.

dbt changed the approach to create trustworthy, well-governed data and built technology that enables teams to work with a modern approach. dbt takes a code-first approach, meaning all data transformations are written and managed as modular SQL code within a development environment designed for software best practices. This is different from many legacy or GUI-based tools, where transformation logic is built visually, often making it harder to track, test, and collaborate on changes.

When you start your 45-day Enterprise license trial, you’ll explore features such as automatic validation of data quality at every step. See how individual developers and analytics engineers can collaborate and iterate quickly to deploy models, all while organization-wide standards, security controls, and documentation are enforced. The real difference, though, is the platform approach and specifically a system that understands metadata so you can get “reliable, trustworthy and nuanced answers” as dbt Lab’s CEO, Tristan Handy, points out.

How dbt helps startups build scalable, reliable analytics pipelines

The tools and approaches you implement as a data leader will determine the success of your business, and your data systems are the nervous system. If you’re like me, you want a central nervous system that remains calm and not overtaxed.

That’s exactly the metaphor for what dbt does to elevate the work of every data professional. Without dbt, you’re just pulling the next ticket from a queue. With dbt, you’re building organization-wide knowledge systems, allowing your data practitioners to do their best and most important work orders of magnitude faster without tech debt weighing them down.

It’s not just the experience of using dbt. It’s one system, deployed smoothly and integrated with your Google suite. Many data leaders at startups experience tech debt from manual scripts and piecemeal workflows that got the initial POC done, but are now bursting at the seams, both in their capacity to handle bigger volumes of data as well as ballooning costs. You know that’s painful and also that you have to meet the needs of the modern data engineer.

We want amazing outcomes for startups. Dealing with fewer remedial tasks means you and your team get more time on the interesting, impactful work at the heart of your business.

Why dbt helps attract and retain top data talent at startups

We’re addressing this last, but the number one most important piece of the driving success on data teams is the humans. Tristan Handy said it best in the Analytics Development Lifecycle blog when he said, “We believe that teams are capable of practicing analytics in a way that hits a far higher mark on these dimensions simultaneously. This requires both better analytical systems and more mature analytical workflows.” It’s cumulative of the technology, the approach, and the people who bring it to life. It’s important that there is a human-first approach in making your data org thrive under the immense startup business pressures.

Having a large pool of trusted experts is vital for rapidly evolving organizations like yours. There are over 100,000 members in the dbt Community. This is a place where data professionals of any skill can ask questions, debate ideas, and push each other forward. There are also hundreds of Google engineers and product leaders active in the community as experts and advocates for your data transformation questions.

dbt is the standard in data transformation, and your startup benefits greatly from established standards in education and learning. When you’re looking to build a high-performing team, you want talent that can ramp quickly. Employees with dbt certifications can jump into your stack and have an impact quickly. Additionally, dbt is well respected by users, according to G2, and regularly, our own SI partners share with us that their consultants request to work on dbt projects because they love the product so much.

dbt Labs and Google Cloud partnership: Accelerating startup data success

Google and dbt share a passion for customer success, and it’s our rich collaboration that will continue to deliver innovation for you to develop your startup. Most recently, we recapped our releases announced at Google Next 25, launched support of Apache Iceberg tables in BigQuery, and outlined how to train a linear regression model with dbt and BigFrames.

dbt is available on Google Cloud and can be purchased on the Google Cloud Marketplace, so you have the combined benefit of easy deployment and procurement.

How to claim your 45-day free trial

If you’re not yet a Google for Startups Cloud Program member, start here. For Google Startup Scale Tier organizations, visit the Startup Perks site and register to receive the unique URL for dbt’s 45-day Enterprise free trial.

Our team looks forward to connecting with you to help you unlock your team’s expertise.