June 26, 2023 • 3 minute read •

Introducing Two New Self-Serve Plans for Dagster Cloud

'Solo' and 'Team' plans, with event-based pricing, will replace the old compute-duration based plan. We explain why we are making this change.

Name: Pete Hunt
Handle: @floydophone

Today we're announcing some changes to our self-serve Dagster Cloud plans, based on feedback we've heard from the community.

Problems with our old model

We launched Dagster Cloud to GA a little under a year ago. Our self-serve pricing at launch was quite simple: we charged a few cents per step-minute of compute.

We also added a small surcharge for our Serverless users, intending to pass through the AWS compute costs to our customers transparently with a modest markup.

Our assumption was that this model would align with the value we create for users and that the runtime of a data pipeline would correlate strongly with the business value of the pipeline and, therefore, the orchestrator's role in it.

In practice, there were several issues with the old model.

For long-running steps, we have, in effect, been charging customers while our service sat idle, waiting on compute happening in other systems. Many customers felt this was unreasonable and did not correlate with the value we were providing, which we accept.
Jobs with a high degree of parallelism paid a markup for Serverless compute, as the surcharge was applied to step-minutes rather than run-minutes. For example, if a run had two concurrent steps executed for 1 minute, we'd charge for 2 Serverless minutes, even though we only paid AWS for 1 Serverless minute.
Users with complex but fast pipelines were overly subsidized by users with simpler, but longer-running pipelines. Additionally, small teams were unfairly subsidizing large teams.

Since our launch, we have evolved our Enterprise pricing model to address these changes, and we've received very positive feedback from customers. The changes below bring our self-serve packaging and pricing in line with our Enterprise pricing model.

New Solo and Team Plans

We're introducing two new self-serve plans to replace the current Standard plan: Solo and Team. These plans will drop the existing compute-duration based pricing mechanism in favor of event-based pricing (called Dagster Credits) and per-seat pricing above certain limits:

The Solo plan, priced at $10 per month, offers 5,000 Dagster Credits and one developer seat. It's designed with individuals and small-scale operations in mind.
The Team plan caters to small- and medium-sized teams. For $100 per month, you'll receive 20,000 Dagster Credits and three developer seats, with the ability to add more if needed.

Shifting to Dagster Credits

As mentioned above, we're shifting from computation time to Dagster Credits. A Dagster Credit is expended for every asset materialization and op execution.

All About Seats

Our Team plan starts at 3 seats, with the ability to add more as needed. However, only “editor” and “admin” users are considered seats. “Viewers” - users who can monitor jobs and consume metadata but not launch new jobs - are free and unlimited.

Serverless Minutes

Dagster has two deployment types: Hybrid and Serverless.

Because we host user compute on Serverless, we charge $0.005 per run-minute in addition to Dagster Credits for these customers. Unlike the previous model which used step-minutes, run-minutes closely align with our underlying infrastructure costs and no longer penalize highly parallel use cases.

When to Upgrade to Enterprise

Dagster Cloud Enterprise gives you many benefits over Teams when you hit scale, including:

Lower prices for Dagster Credits
Enterprise features like single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control (RBAC), and audit trails.
Multiple deployments and more fine-grained user roles

How We're Rolling This Out

In planning these changes, we solicited feedback on our packaging strategy and adjusted accordingly.

One critical point echoed by many was the need for Dagster to remain affordable and have predictable pricing. Keeping these points in mind, we've chosen price points, credit allotments, and seat bundles that should ensure that the majority of teams never pay more than the fixed price.

Perhaps most importantly, all existing customers can keep their existing pricing model. The new pricing takes effect only for new signups starting today.

What Remains Unchanged

The feature sets and support guarantees of our open-source, Standard (now Solo and Team), and Enterprise packages remain the same.

Your Feedback Matters

Our goal is to strike the right balance between maximizing user value and securing Dagster's sustainable growth. We're deeply grateful for your continued feedback, understanding, trust, and support. We anticipate your thoughts, questions, or concerns regarding these updates.

Your feedback has been, and will continue to be, integral as we align with the objectives detailed in our Dagster Master Plan. And as always, join our community to learn more and get involved.

Thanks!

— Pete

We're always happy to hear your feedback, so please reach out to us! If you have any questions, ask them in the Dagster community Slack (join here!) or start a Github discussion. If you run into any bugs, let us know with a Github issue. And if you're interested in working with us, check out our open roles!

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