Build vs buy is over. A connector now costs $100 a year.

The traditional build-vs-buy dilemma for data connectors is argued to be obsolete. With AI agents handling pipeline creation (under 2 hours and ~$5 in tokens) and dlt's 99.83% production success rate, annual maintenance costs drop to roughly $100 per connector. The post contrasts this with SaaS ELT vendors that charge row-based pricing, which can cause unpredictable bill spikes. Real-world examples show a startup cutting bills 182x after switching, and a CTO migrating an entire Airbyte stack to dlt in five days using Claude Code. dltHub is presented as the managed platform that operationalizes dlt with observability, data quality, and an agentic toolkit for the whole team.

Source: https://dlthub.com/blog/tco. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.