Yes, Dagster is free. The open-source core is Apache 2.0, and you can run all of it on your own servers without paying Dagster Labs anything. That answers the licence question. It doesn't answer the budget question.
The budget question is whether you'd rather pay Dagster Labs or pay with your own hours. I self-host a production Dagster instance on a homelab Docker Swarm. It runs 112 assets, 57 schedules and 3 sensors for one person, me. Here is what the paid product costs today, what self-hosting has cost me in time, and a minimal setup you can start from.
Is Dagster free? What open source gives you
The open-source packages give you the whole orchestrator: assets, partitions, schedules, sensors, asset checks, the run queue and the web UI. Nothing in my pipeline needed a paid feature. The Dagster repository is licensed Apache-2.0.
What you take on is running it. A self-hosted Dagster has four parts:
- Postgres for run history, event logs and schedule state. SQLite works on a laptop; I use it for local development only.
- Code locations: containers that load your definitions and serve them over gRPC.
- dagster-webserver: the UI and the GraphQL API.
- dagster-daemon: schedules, sensors, the run queue, retries and run monitoring.
None of these is hard to start. Keeping them healthy for a year is the real work.
What Dagster+ costs
I checked dagster.io/pricing on 1 October 2026:
| Plan | Price | Includes | Per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo | $10 / month | 1 user, 1 code location, 1 deployment | $0.040 |
| Starter | $100 / month | up to 3 users, 5 code locations, 1 deployment | $0.035 |
| Pro | contact sales | unlimited seats, code locations and deployments | custom |
Serverless compute was $0.010 a minute on Solo and Starter. Solo and Starter had a 30-day free trial. The page defines a credit as one asset materialization or one op execution, and says a Hybrid deployment, where your own infrastructure runs the code, has no compute charge. There is no free tier on the page, only the trial.
To see what credits mean for you, count materializations. My pipeline has 112 assets, 36 of them partitioned (34 daily). Every daily partition of every daily asset is a credit, every day, plus every retry. Do that sum for your own graph before you assume a plan fits. I haven't priced my pipeline on Dagster+, so I won't guess my number.
This is the first part. The full post — including the rest of the working details — is on my site: Is Dagster free? Self-hosting Dagster vs Dagster+
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