Fivetran Pricing Explained

Fivetran pricing is based on a concept called “Monthly Active Rows” (MARs), which is the amount of data from your sources that changes (either new or updated data) and is then loaded into your target CDW. In essence, it is a volume-based pricing model.

The key questions are: can I accurately estimate my MARs and will my MARs grow over time or see dramatic swings? This comes down to price/cost predictability and budgeting.

Many organizations using cloud data warehouses and cloud analytics are either (a) high growth companies or (b) larger organizations with high volumes of data. Many use CDWs for more granular analytics around customer behavior, recommendations, marketing optimization, and customer experience.

This means a high volume of data changes regularly, volumes steadily grow, and companies can experience volume spikes for certain events, campaigns, seasons, and more. This unpredictability leads to a steady rise in Fivetran costs and cause unexpected monthly overages. Many Fivetran users complain about the Fivetran pricing model in their G2 reviews.

What do Fivetran Pricing tiers provide?

Starter

Only includes pre-built connectors and post-load SQL transformations

Standard

Opens database connectors into your data warehouse, and grants access to the Fivetran API

Enterprise

Adds VPN tunnels and data SLAs

Datameer

Datameer provides the industry’s first collaborative, multi-persona data transformation platform integrated into Snowflake. The multi-persona UI, with no-code, low-code, and code (SQL) tools, brings together your entire team – data engineers, analytics engineers, analysts, and data scientists – on a single platform to collaboratively transform and model data. Catalog-like data documentation and knowledge sharing facilitate trust in the data and crowd-sourced data governance.

Datameer is similar to Fivetran in two ways: (a) the Datameer solution is SaaS, requiring no IT support or maintenance, (b) both products have integration into Snowflake. The two are highly complementary as customers can use the products together in an ELT stack, with Fivetran as the EL and Datameer as the T.

Unlike Fivetran, Datameer charges a simple rate per user. We do not charge based on the data volume (or lines of data), nor do we charge for additional processing power when performing in-pipeline transformations. You should not have to guess how much your ETL/ELT tool will cost you. Straightforward pricing means you know how much to budget for your ETL needs managing costs whether you’re dealing with small or large datasets or simple and complex transformation workflows.

Fivetran claims transparency in their pricing but all you get is complexity, and no way to predict in advance how much your EL solution will cost you. Fivetran pricing is credit-based in which credits are consumed based on monthly usage. Credit usage is determined by the number of Monthly Active Rows (MARs) within each billing account across a billing period. A formula and consumption table determine the conversion rate of MARs to credits – with minimum MAR usage requirements to receive rates on the consumption table.

Looking for a straightforward pricing solution for your data transformation?

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True Scalability of your "T" with Datameer

Fivetran works well for companies as a “data loader”, especially for moving raw data from SaaS applications and cloud services into Snowflake. But, Fivetran’s data transformation tools simply do not scale, requiring extensive SQL coding. In addition, your Fivetran bill will grow with that too.

The most efficient and cost-effective ELT data stack is to use what each product is good for – Fivetran for the EL and Datameer for the T. Datameer has been selling data transformation tools for many years and has continually evolved these with the market. Many of the largest enterprises in the world use Datameer for data transformation including Citibank, Royal Bank of Canada, British Telecom, Bank of Montreal, Aetna, Optum, Morningstar, Vivint, and more.

If you are an enterprise and are moving to the cloud, Datameer is the data transformation brand to trust.