Developing
Data engineers raised questions about future pricing and the pace of dbt Core development.
In 60 seconds
- Fivetran and dbt Labs completed their all-stock merger on June 1, 2026; it was announced on October 13, 2025.
- George Fraser is CEO and Tristan Handy is President; the combined company approaches $600 million in annual recurring revenue.
- dbt serves more than 80,000 data teams, and about 80-90% of Fivetran customers already use dbt.
- dbt Core v2.0 remains open source under Apache 2.0, including the new Rust-based Fusion engine.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- The ingestion, transformation and (with Census) reverse-ETL layers of a common data stack now come from one company.
- Why it matters
- Marketing data teams that use the modern data stack face a single vendor for the pipeline from source to activation, which affects pricing leverage.
- Who is affected
- Data and marketing operations teams on Fivetran, dbt or both, and competing pipeline vendors.
- Martech stack area
- Data
- Stack impact
- Review contract terms and renewal dates, and keep your dbt models portable.
- Business impact
- Moderate The details come from a third-party explainer; we did not read a company announcement. Concerns about pricing are community opinion.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- Bundled pricing, dbt Core's development pace, and how reverse ETL (Census) fits in.
Fivetran and dbt Labs completed their all-stock merger on June 1, 2026. The deal was announced on October 13, 2025, according to an explainer by Hevo Data.
The facts
- George Fraser of Fivetran is CEO; Tristan Handy, founder of dbt Labs, is President.
- The combined business approaches $600 million in annual recurring revenue and serves more than 80,000 data teams. About 80 to 90% of Fivetran’s customers already use dbt.
- dbt Core v2.0 stays open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, including the new Rust-based Fusion engine.
- Products mentioned: Fusion (30 times faster parsing on large projects, per the report), dbt State (reportedly cutting warehouse compute by more than 30%), dbt Wizard, an AI assistant, an open metadata standard called Agents Schema and an AI Connector Builder.
With Fivetran’s earlier purchase of Census, the explainer says the stack now ships from ingestion to activation from one vendor.
Concerns
Data engineers raised questions about dbt Core’s development pace, Fivetran’s historically high pricing and the rationale for acquiring both dbt and a competitor, SQLMesh. The report expects tighter integration and bundled pricing over time, though neither is mandated.
Our read
For a marketing data team the question is leverage. When one vendor owns more of the pipeline, switching one piece becomes harder. The open-source commitment is a protection, and a sensible precaution is to keep transformations in plain SQL models you can run elsewhere. We relied on one explainer, not on the companies’ own announcements.
Sources
- Hevo Data: Fivetran and dbt merger explained, what changes for your data stack (opens in a new tab)
Source of the dates, structure, scale, open-source commitment, product launches and community reaction.