Most small and medium businesses don’t need hyperscale data infrastructure; they need something reliable, cost‑efficient, and easy to own.

Telary’s open data platform is a pragmatic alternative to a “modern stack” built on BigQuery + dbt Core + GitHub Actions. You keep full control by running in your own environment, avoid lock‑in and surprise bills, and still cover the majority of analytics and automation workloads with far less operational friction.

Below is a practical comparison, where Telary fits best, what you trade off, and how the cost curve tends to look in real projects.

What you’re really buying with BigQuery + dbt + GitHub Actions

For teams that pick BigQuery with dbt and GitHub Actions, the appeal is clear:

• Elastic compute with minimal ops overhead
• Mature SQL experience and integrations
• Simple CI/CD for transformations

That stack shines when you truly need cloud‑scale concurrency and petabyte data. But many SMEs pay for that potential every month without using it, and operate across multiple vendors and pricing models (credits, minutes, storage, egress). The result: great technology, harder cost predictability and limited control over data residency and operations.

How Telary is different (and why it works for SMEs)

Telary is an open platform that runs inside your own infrastructure on premises or in your cloud account. It’s built from proven open‑source components (DuckDB, Airflow, Superset, Marimo) and wrapped with sensible defaults and automation.

What this means in practice:

• Hosting flexibility: we deploy it where your compliance requires; keep data close to systems.
• Cost efficiency by design: no proprietary credits; no surprise on‑demand query bills. You pay for modest VMs/storage you control, and that’s it.
• Versatility without heavy setup: ELT/ETL, scheduled jobs, notebooks, and dashboards out of the box—no hunting for five different managed add‑ons.
• Human‑operable: your team can understand, extend, and debug it. We help you start fast and keep the stack lean.

Side‑by‑side comparison

Aspect	BigQuery + dbt + GitHub Actions	Telary
Data control & residency	Data in vendor cloud; region constraints	Runs in your VPC/on‑prem; full control; or managed for you
Cost model	Credits per query/warehouse + CI minutes + storage	Flat, low cost infra (VMs, disks)
Lock‑in	High (SQL engine + billing + ecosystem)	Low (OSS engines; portable formats)
Setup/maintenance	Low ops, but multi‑vendor wiring	One cohesive stack with templates
Scalability	Near‑infinite on paper	Scales to typical SME loads reliably

Limitations and trade‑offs

We’re explicit about where Telary is not the best fit:

• Concurrency at hyperscale: If you need hundreds of simultaneous dashboard queries and multi‑team batch jobs hitting petabytes, BigQuery‑class systems win on elasticity.
• Always‑on heavy compute: Compute‑intensive ML training or massive joins that must complete in seconds for many users will stress a small data platform like Telary.
• Global data sharing: If cross‑organization data sharing and marketplace distribution are core to your strategy, a cloud warehouse may be more convenient.

For the vast majority of SMEs, these aren’t day‑to‑day constraints. Most teams care about reliability, predictable performance, and owning costs. Telary handles that comfortably and grows with you, scale up machines, add a node, or use managed object storage and caching as you need.

Two practical scenarios

1) Finance & Ops analytics

• Sources: ERP, CRM, payments, time tracking
• Work: daily ELT, dimensional models, month‑end close dashboards
• Telary fit: Parquet + DuckDB transformations with Airflow scheduling; Superset dashboards refreshed on schedule. Infra sits at ~2–4 vCPUs and cheap storage. Outcome: stable BI with strong ownership, low cost.

2) Product & Growth analytics

• Sources: event logs, product DB, marketing APIs
• Work: exploration bursts before launches, weekly experiments, model backfills
• Telary fit: notebooks for quick analyses; schedule incremental models. Outcome: experiments stay fast without paying per‑query premiums; costs steady even during spikes.

Owning the platform = owning the risk

Because Telary can run in your environment, you get:

• Full data control and compliance: align with your data policies, VPC boundaries, and audit needs.
• End‑to‑end observability: one place to see jobs, models, tests, and dashboards—no hopping across vendor consoles.
• Simple capacity planning: add a small VM or more storage when you actually need it; no more surprise bills for “busy weeks.”
• Exit options: standards‑based storage and open tools keep switching costs low.

Conclusion: a pragmatic default for SMEs

BigQuery + dbt + GitHub Actions is excellent technology, but it’s not the most cost‑effective default for most small and medium businesses. Telary gives you 90% of the capability with a fraction of the cost and complexity, and you keep the keys. You can still choose a cloud warehouse later if your workload truly demands it: by then you’ll know why.

Try Telary or contact us for a short demo. We’ll map your workloads, estimate your monthly posture, and (if it’s a fit) stand up a pilot you can own.

To summarize

📅 Typical setup: minutes if we deploy it for you; days (not months) if deployed in your VPC/on‑prem.

🎯 Outcome: full data control, predictable spend

📦 Deliverable: working pipelines, dashboards, and a cost model you understand