Get a Project

Everything you build in this guide lives inside a project: the data you load, the SQL you write, the flow that runs them on a schedule. This page just gets you one. Step 1 of the Getting Started arc.

No Kai path here: Kai works inside a project, so this one step is yours. From step 2 on, every building step can be done either way.

What you need

Nothing except an email address. If your company already uses Keboola, ask a colleague to invite you instead of creating your own project — you probably want to work in theirs.

What a project is

A project is a self-contained workspace: its own data storage, its own configurations, its own users, and its own billing. Nothing leaks between projects unless you deliberately share it through the Data Catalog.

Most of what you see in this guide — buckets, connectors, transformations, flows — lives inside one project. Larger organizations run several of them; see Multi-Project Architecture when you get there.

Get a project

You have three ways in, in order of how quickly they get you started:

1. Free Plan — sign up and create a free project right now. It is enough for everything in this guide: 250 GB of Storage and up to 60 minutes of job runtime a month (the free allowance tracks your previous month’s usage).

   See [Pay As You Go](/management/payg-project/)

   for the full list of limits — including that the Free Plan does not let you choose a stack and gives you one project.

2. Join an existing project — ask an admin of your company’s Keboola organization to invite you. They do it from Users & Settings in the project, with Invite User.

3. Talk to us — for a trial of a full project with a chosen stack and no Free Plan limits, contact Keboola.

What a stack is

A stack is a full, independent instance of Keboola in one cloud provider and one region — for example connection.eu-central-1.keboola.com (AWS Frankfurt). Projects never span stacks, and an account on one stack does not exist on another, so the URL you sign in at is part of your project’s identity.

You do not pick one here: self-serve projects are created on a fixed stack, and projects on any other stack come through a sales contract — the Talk to us route above. The list of stacks is in the platform overview.

Find your way around

After signing in you land on the project dashboard. Five places matter for this guide:

• Components — every data source connector, data destination connector, and application you can add to the project. This is where you configure how data gets in and out.
• Transformations — the code that reshapes your data: SQL, Python, R, and dbt. Which of them a project offers is listed in its own Create Transformation dialog, so that dialog is the answer to “what can this project run?”.
• Storage — every table and file in the project, organized into buckets. Its tabs cover Tables & Buckets, Files, Data Streams, Storage Jobs and Events.
• Flows — the automation layer: what runs, in what order, on what schedule. Projects that have both kinds show this as Conditional Flows.
• Jobs — the log of everything that has run, successfully or not.

Ask Kai to orient you

This is the one step of the arc Kai cannot do for you — it lives inside a project, so there has to be a project first. From here on, each building step offers both paths as a Do it with Kai tab — on step 4 it takes over only after you have authorized Google yourself.

Look for Kai Agent in the top bar. It has to be enabled first and it is not on every stack, so see Get started with Kai if you cannot find it. On a project you inherit rather than create, the first question is usually (Data Exploration):

I'm new to this project. Give me an overview of the data structure and what each bucket contains.

Check it worked

Two things. The second one is worth settling now rather than halfway through step 2:

• Open Storage and you can see the project’s bucket list. Empty is fine — that is what you are about to change.

• Kai Agent in the top bar opens a chat panel when you click it. Worth confirming now, because every building step from here offers a Do it with Kai path. If the button is missing, or clicking it asks you to switch the feature on, that is the feature gate — an organization admin does it, and a non-admin needs them or Support. There is also a monthly message allowance, and it is smaller on Pay As You Go.

  Not having Kai does not block the build: every step’s clicking path is written out in full. The one place you will miss it is step 5’s closing question, which only Kai answers — you can run the same aggregate in a workspace instead.

If it goes wrong

• The sign-up email never arrives. Check spam, then try again — a half-finished registration does not block a retry with the same address.
• You sign in and see no project. You are signed into the wrong stack, or your invite is still pending. Confirm the exact URL with whoever invited you.
• Your company uses SSO. Sign in through your organization’s link rather than creating a new account; a fresh Free Plan project will not have access to your team’s data.

Next: Load your data →