If your team is using Dagster Cloud's Solo or Starter tiers, the May 2026 pricing update probably gave you a bit of a shock. By removing the monthly credit allowance and charging for each step-executed asset materialization, workspaces that used to cost $10–$100 a month suddenly spiked into the hundreds or even over a thousand dollars.
At Narev, we love the developer experience of Dagster, but our 24/7 schedule was driving up our bill to the point where self-hosting Airflow was starting to look attractive.
Before jumping ship, we audited our setup and found a massive quick win: we were paying Dagster to coordinate a graph that dbt already understood. Here is how we fixed it and cut our orchestration bill by 60%.
The culprit: @dbt_assets
The standard dagster-dbt component is beautiful. You use @dbt_assets, and Dagster maps every single dbt model and seed into an individual node in your Dagster UI.
