Managing project-level access to dbt intermediate models in Snowflake

The problem

Teams using dbt and Snowflake may create hundreds of intermediate models across projects. Placing them in shared schemas creates excessive data access, while granting permissions table by table is difficult to maintain and does not automatically cover future models. Teams need a consistent way to define project ownership, schema boundaries, role inheritance, and access to newly deployed dbt objects.

Who feels this pain

Teams stuck doing repetitive manual work run into this often: A governance and access-control SaaS for dbt and Snowflake that maps dbt projects to isolated schemas or databases, generates least-privilege Snowflake roles and future-object grants, applies RBAC policies during deployment, and continuously detects permission drift. It could also classify intermediate models as private or shared and provide an audit view of who can access each model.

Why it matters

Every hour spent on a task a computer could do is an hour not spent growing the business.

Potential SaaS angle

A focused SaaS product built by automating the exact repetitive step described here could turn this into a real workflow automation & efficiency opportunity — there's already demand behind it.

Related workflow automation & efficiency pain points