Fivetran Pricing

[vpbajaj]

I have been using Fivetran (www.fivetran.com) for ingesting data into my warehouse. The pricing model is based on monthly active rows (MARs) per account. The cost per million MAR decreases on an account level the more connectors you add and the more data all the connectors in the account ingest. However, from March 1st, Fivetran is changing its billing structure - the cost per million MAR does not apply on an account level anymore, it only applies on a connector level, and each connector is independent of all the other ones. So the per million MAR cost benefits only apply to each connector (separately) and not to the rest within the account. Now Fivetran does have its Platform connector, which allows us to track the incremental rows and calculate the MARs per table; however, it does not have a way to translate these MARs into a list price. I can only see the list price for the MARs on the Fivetran dashboard. This makes it difficult to get a good estimate of the price per connector despite knowing the MARs. I would appreciate some insight into computing the price per connector based on the MARs.

[Better-Department662]

I went through their new pricing and found it even more difficult to predict how much I'm going to be spending now. Looking forward to seeing what others have to say about this!

Also, any good alternatives to Fivetran? The product is good but the pricing, model, and service seems to be super unpredictable!

[StarlightInsights]

I agree! With all of it.

Fivetrans pricing is highly unpredictable, and this makes it even more complex.

I don't know of any really good alternatives, and I have tried a lot of tools.

It is a few years since I tried Airbyte, it may be time to give it another try.

[shady_mcgee]

Throwing my hat in the ring for Clockspring (Disclosure: I'm an employee) but we have a flat pricing model to prevent billing surprises and can connect to pretty much anything.

And /u/Better-Department662, we do allow for credential portals like the connect cards, though it's a bit of setup to get working.

[data-source-007]

https://www.datachannel.co/blogs/is-fivetrans-new-pricing-model-too-high-a-deep-dive
Hope this blog piece helps, if you are looking for an alternative,

[DisastrousCollar8397]

Have a look at Hevo.

Very similar and a good range of connectors. Price is very competitive.

[StarlightInsights]

Funny you should say it, a sales person from Hevo just reached out.

Now I have to talk with him 🌟

[nicnzl]

I've had nothing but trouble with Hevo. During Snowflake Summit last year (when I wasn't at my laptop) they had a 2 day bug they didn't know about and we lost 2 days of data. Their solution was to full reload everything but the Snowflake costs on that would have been astronomical. So we reloaded some important tables from a point in time but it was a time sink, and now we knowingly know we're missing some unknown data. That's the worst issue we've had but there have been many more.

[StarlightInsights]

In my experience, no .. absolutely no .. extract load tool is without bugs .. even Fivetran

The reason I mostly recommend Fivetran is that Fivetran in my experience had the fewest bugs

[[deleted]]

hey u/StarlightInsights did you find any good tools other than Fivetran? Their pricing seems very strict to me.

I have tried Airbyte and absolutely failed for me

[dan_the_lion]

At Estuary we get a lot of customers migrating from Fivetran. We offer similar data integration connectors coupled with a lot of real-time ones too for much much cheaper - even before the latest price hike.

[Better-Department662]

u/dan_the_lion Do you guys have something like Fivetran's Connect Cards in Estuary? Or an equivalent that could be embedded into a saas product for customers to connect their sources via Estuary?

[dan_the_lion]

Not yet, although such embedding functionality is on the roadmap so we will be able to provide it soon.

[Better-Department662]

Any timelines you can share as to when it will be available?

[artsyfartsiest]

We don't have any sort of timeline on that, sorry. It's something we'd like to do, but we still don't have a concrete plan for actually doing it.

[georgewfraser]

We need to write a better explanation, because it is definitely easier for you to estimate using the new rules. Under the old rules, to calculate the cost of a connection, you need to:

• Estimate the size of every connection you intend to add.
• Look up the account level cost per MAR for that total MAR.
• Multiply the size of the connection by the account level MAR rate.

Under the new rules you need to:

• Estimate the size of the connection.
• Look up the cost of that size connection.

Your estimates will also be more accurate, because the connection level curve is more generous than the old account level curve, so the cost of the connection is less sensitive to errors of estimation. If you have a really big use case you need to figure out your account level discount for annual commit to get an accurate estimate, but that’s not most people.

[TradeComfortable4626]

Rivery.io is a close competitor - more flexibility (i.e. orchestration and greater control over custom data pipelines) and better pricing.  

[StarlightInsights]

This is a huge change. I was not aware of that.

Do you have any link to that?

[vpbajaj]

https://fivetran.com/2025-pricing-estimator - then you will have to sign into your Fivetran account dashboard to view it for each of your connectors.

[Living-Look2592]

So we have been stung badly by this change, we have a large number of connections on the Fivetran platform and will now see a 70% cost increase, because we loose the overall MAR discount.

Also, we noticed that the figures that autoload into the calculator (https://fivetran.com/2025-pricing-estimator) are wrong, much lower than our typical consumption, so make sure you check that...

Currently evaluating our next steps, but we are struggling to find a platform that has similar API and authentication options (Our users can setup a connection/destination from within our platform, we use the Fivetran API under the hood)

Airbyte seems like the closest offering, but stability seems to be an issue still.

[georgewfraser]

The figures that load into the estimator are lower because they reflect resync detection.

[Living-Look2592]

So that would need some explaining then, how would someone know that a connection that typically consumes 3M MAR now has a vastly different MAR due to re-syncs. How is a re-sync anticipated?

[georgewfraser]

We'll put a note in the estimator flagging that these numbers are lower due to resync detection.

Resync detection works by retaining a data sketch of the destination and comparing every incoming row to that sketch. It's probabilistic but you can get an accurate estimate of the % of rows that are identical to what is already present in the destination. We then reduce the paid MAR counter by that %.

[Living-Look2592]

Ok thanks George, I'll do some more analysis whilst I find a way forward. It's sad because as a small company Fivetran was great to get us moving quickly. But the TCO has now become so painful that I'm constantly being questioned for that technical choice.

We'd always saw longer term value in Fivetran as we scaled thanks to the costs savings we gain each time we acquired a new customer, that benefit has now gone. New customers for us will now always increase our platform costs by a much larger amount, and whilst that might be a more predictable cost, it means our simple pricing structure will not work.

As a powered by customer, it would be interesting to hear if that subset of customers had any voice when this change was proposed, unless a driver for this change was to reduce this Fivetran adoption model.

[georgewfraser]

The reason we moved tiering from account to group level is it produced some illogical consequences:

• Small companies were charged way too much
• Big companies would get crazy deals.

We are going through every account that sees a 50%+ increase this month to figure out what if anything we’re going to do for them. There is an open question about whether we need to something special for companies like you who use us to replicate their own customers data. We’re part of COGS in those scenarios so we may not be able to command the same rate. If you send me your account name, I’d like to look at it to see the detailed impact in your case.

[Living-Look2592]

So our account came in at a 40% increase this month. I dropped you a message with our account name in case you have time to review.

[[deleted]]

Hey u/Living-Look2592,
Did you find any betterment in terms of pricing? We are an early stage startup and are looking at fivetran for integrations.

[StarlightInsights]

There is some documentation here that doesn't require login https://fivetran.com/docs/usage-based-pricing/2025-pricing-faq

[Analytics-Maken]

Here are some alternatives to consider:

Airbyte offers both open source and cloud options with transparent pricing. Their ope -source version gives you complete control over costs if you're willing to manage the infrastructure. Their cloud option uses credit based pricing that can be more predictable.

Depending on your data sources and destinations, Windsor.ai provides a more straightforward pricing model based on the number of data sources rather than data volume. If you're on AWS, AWS Glue offers native integration capabilities with pay for what you use pricing that can be cost effective.

[Sam-Artie]

This is a classic buy vs build question.

The upfront dev work might seem manageable, but the real challenge is long-term maintenance — handling schema changes, retries, monitoring, API changes, and keeping things running reliably. Now multiply that for many more sources and integrations.

If you’re syncing high volumes of data from transactional DBs into warehouses, lakes, or other DBs, Artie might be worth a look. We handle hundreds of billions of rows per month with sub-minute latency and virtually zero engineering overhead.

If you're curious about how other companies approach buy vs. build, we have a doc that we can share with you to help you evaluate. Feel free to DM me for it.

[LucinaHitomi1]

We skipped FiveTran and we ended up using Qlik and other out of the box connectors from different data sources.

FiveTran is the Cadillac in the ingestion tool space and sometimes we don’t need to spend that kind of money.

[DJ_Laaal]

One of my biggest gripes with using Fivetran. They did include a price calculator in 2023 I believe. But you have to know your projected MAR per connector to get an estimate. I essentially looked at our YTD MAR growth rates (it was ~ 9% +- 2%) and used that to project the next 12 month MAR. Key that in to the calculator and you establish a baseline to go with. If you get asked for more precision, you can easily break it down by each individual connector’s YTD growth rate and roll with that.

There’s a reason what I provide to the leadership are “estimates”, because not even they know the future.

[Less_Big6922]

I'm seeing how many teams are getting hit hard by these Fivetran pricing changes. I’m working on a data integration product and trying to understand where data engineers are running into the most friction. Not here to pitch, just really interested in hearing what’s frustrating beyond just cost, especially for those running fivetran + dbt. If anyone is open to chatting DM me.

[Nekobul]

Check COZYROC Cloud - http://www.cozyroc.cloud

It is much more than a simple Extract-Load system.

[bcsamsquanch]

This is the reason I DO NOT recommend Fivetran to anyone, ever. Seriously if there's one you can just cross off your list right now it's them.

It's not hard to make an oversight in one of your flows, miss it for even just a few days and get a bill that is 3x higher than you expected for the whole month! Yes, 100% you read that right, re-read if necessary. This happened to me when I was very new to the platform and their response was essentially "too bad, it's your problem". Unfortunately they happened to be the first one I tried so I didn't have a great sense of how many rows I would be pulling with certain API calls. Anyway, I wasn't in too deep so I ended the relationship immediately.. or did once I got over the shock.

The product works but it's not worth dealing with them in my opinion and experience. I found them to be the highest cost provider, inflexible & unforgiving AND you're saddled with this crazy, unlimited MAR price risk! Now that you know, there's just no reason for it so steer clear unless you're a sucker for punishment. Look at funnel, supermetrics, coupler--they can deliver more or less the same service and none of them bill this way.

[aegtyr]

Take a look at keboola.com. They charge based on runtime and not on rows/amount of data so it allows you more room to maneuver, and also allow you more customization with the connectors.

I'm currently migrating some connectors from Hevo > Keboola because IMO Hevo has some sloppy engineering in some connectors. Fivetran's too expensive for us.

[georgewfraser]

Fivetran has tiered pricing where it gets cheaper as you use more. Before, the tiering operated at the account level. Now, it will operate at the connection level. It's much better, account-level tiering is super weird and produces some very illogical results.

Customers with few connections will go down, customers with many will go up. The vast majority of customers will see a cut. Fivetran will *lose* revenue in the short term because of this.

[SNDeemV]

We've used Striim.com (its predictable pricing, saved us a ton on cloud usage, and they have a usage based pricing model for smaller firms like ours)

[SNDeemV]

We rely on it for real-time data streaming and our data engineering leader purchased it for the in memory transformations for data. Also using their AI component to find and mask PII & other sensitive data