Fivetran is one of the most popular data integration platforms, enabling users to link data from over 500 sources to their preferred reporting and analytics destinations. However, the pricing packages offered by Fivetran can be costly and intricate.
With Fivetran’s recent pricing update taking effect in March 2025, you might wonder how these changes impact your costs. In this article, we’ll break down the latest Fivetran pricing structure, explain how it works, and explore alternatives if the new model doesn’t align with your needs.
How Fivetran pricing works
Fivetran uses a volume-based pricing model centered around Monthly Active Rows (MARs)—the number of rows added, updated, or deleted in your Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) each month. This ensures that businesses pay only for the data they actively process.
Additionally, Fivetran charges for transformations based on the number of successful monthly model runs, with pricing tiers ranging from free for up to 5,000 runs to additional costs per run beyond that threshold.
However, with the recent March 2025 Fivetran pricing update, the MAR pricing model will now be applied based on the connection level rather than the account level. This means you’ll be charged per connection, leading to increased costs if you have multiple connections. The good news, though, is that businesses with a single dominant connection will see a reduction in costs.
But that’s not all—Fivetran also made some plan adjustments. As of March 1, 2025, the Starter and Private Deployment plans are no longer available. That said, the newly updated plans include Free, Standard, Enterprise, and Business Critical.
To help you plan your monthly expenses associated with these changes, Fivetran provides a pricing estimator that lets you model and predict costs based on MARs, the number of transformations, and your selected plan.
Keep in mind that a key challenge with MAR-based pricing is its susceptibility to fluctuations. Data volumes can spike due to seasonal changes, marketing campaigns, events, or business growth, leading to unexpected cost increases in Fivetran pricing. Organizations must monitor their usage closely to optimize Fivetran costs and avoid surprises.
To help optimize costs, Fivetran now offers free re-syncs for identical rows and annual contract discounts, depending on the commitment level.
Fivetran plans overview
Apart from being volume-based, Fivetran plans are tailored to different business needs for data integration:
Free
The Free Plan suits first-time users and those with minimal data volumes. It provides access to all Standard Plan features but is limited to 500,000 Monthly Active Rows (MAR) per month and up to 5,000 model runs for transformations. This plan is designed for small teams or individuals looking to explore Fivetran’s functionalities without incurring costs.
However, with the new pricing model, the same re-synced rows will not count in the MAR usage. So, you may need to upgrade to the Standard, Enterprise, and Business Critical plans if you have more connections or growing data needs.
Standard Plan (starts at $500/million MAR)
The Standard Plan is designed for teams that require robust cross-departmental analytics. It includes unlimited users, 15-minute syncs, access to 700+ fully managed connectors, integration for dbt Core, the Fivetran REST API, role-based access control, and SSH tunnels for encryption.
Enterprise Plan (starts at $667/million MAR)
The Enterprise Plan is tailored for large organizations with advanced data needs. In the new pricing update, the MAR pricing is updated at the connection level rather than the account level.
It includes all the features of the Standard Plan but offers faster 1-minute syncs, enterprise database connectors, custom roles, VPN security tunnels (available with an annual contract), SCIM/user provisioning, choice of cloud provider (GCP, AWS, Azure), and a hybrid deployment option.
This plan is well-suited for data teams that require real-time data delivery and stringent governance controls.
Business Critical Plan (starts at $1,067/million MAR)
The Business Critical Plan is designed for global enterprise teams that require high-level data protection and compliance. It’s particularly favored by businesses in highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance, and finance.
This plan offers the highest levels of security and support, customer-managed keys for encryption, private networking options, and PCI DSS Level 1 certification, ensuring your data operations meet stringent compliance standards.
As with the other plans, the Enterprise Plan is also affected by the new pricing update. So the MAR pricing is now applied at the connection level and not at the account level, which means you could incur additional costs with more connections.
Pros and cons of Fivetran pricing
To ensure budget predictability and avoid unexpected charges, businesses are advised to estimate MARs accurately, considering potential spikes and growth in data volume.
Pros of Fivetran pricing
- Usage-based costs: The pricing is based on data volumes, but costs will be calculated based on the number of connections you have.
- 5% discount for annual contracts.
Cons of Fivetran pricing
You can start cheaply, but due to monthly active rows (MAR) and the new pricing update adding extra charges for additional connectors, it quickly becomes expensive, especially when querying granular ads (Google Ads and Facebook Ads data) and Search Console.
For example, Salesforce and CRM data syncs with Fivetran should be okay as they do not change frequently, but media data is making their clients really unhappy.
Fivetran’s discount options
Businesses looking to reduce Fivetran expenses can consider the following discount options:
- Fivetran Startup Program: Offers $50,000 in services for Y Combinator startups.
- Annual discounts: Companies may secure a 5% discount by signing an annual contract.
- Exploring Fivetran alternatives: Switching to a platform with more predictable and cost-effective pricing like Windsor.ai.
Verdict: Is Fivetran worth it?
All in all, Fivetran is a solid ELT solution for businesses that prioritize automation and scalability. Onboarding comes at no cost. There are lucrative discounts and grants provided.
When selecting a data integration platform, it’s crucial to consider the pricing approach that aligns with your requirements. Fivetran follows a volume-based approach, wherein the cost is mainly determined by the data and the number of connectors you utilize.
This approach is similar to the hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure), so it’s well-known in the market.
However, its MAR-based calculations and the recent pricing model updates lead to high costs, particularly for companies with frequent data updates and multiple connectors. The big catch is that once you start to grow and the data volume expands the expenses can become unpredictable.
After talking to Fivetran users and following the topic closely on Reddit this discussion comes to mind:
Since we started buidling our data stack we used Fivetran for the data pipelines. Its great and it works well. Now we’re growing and our costs went from $20/month to $2000/month.
The main challenge is marketing data as Monthly Active Rows do change really quickly. If I pull granular Facebook Ads or Google Search console data my bill goes through the roof.
What works well with Fivetrans pricing for me is syncing Salesforce data. It doesn’t change so often and I can keep the costs low.
Could this be you?
For businesses that require a budget-friendly, efficient, and comprehensive data integration solution, Windsor.ai stands out as one of the best Fivetran alternatives.
Why Windsor.ai is a better alternative to Fivetran
Unlike Fivetran, Windsor.ai offers a transparent pricing model based on the connector’s data flow needs, avoiding the unpredictable Fivetran cost spikes caused by MAR-based billing.
All Windsor.ai’s subscription plans offer unrestricted access to destinations, with limitations on data sources and accounts. While some users may only need a few destinations for analytics and reporting, many businesses prefer the flexibility to work with multiple destinations without incurring additional charges.
Here’s a summary of the key benefits of Windsor.ai, making it a strong Fivetran’s competitor and one of the top alternatives to Supermetrics:
- We offer a cost-effective and transparent pricing model. Starting at just $19 per month, Windsor.ai makes budgeting much more cost-efficient and predictable compared to Fivetran’s usage-based costs.
- For businesses looking for a risk-free way to explore its capabilities, Windsor.ai offers a 30-day Free Trial and a Forever Free Plan.
- With no premium connectors, all our plans provide access to all data destinations at no extra cost, eliminating unnecessary expenses for businesses that need to work with databases or data warehouses. What’s more, our database destination pricing is independent of row count.
- We support over 315 data sources and provide full ELT functionality on all plans, offering businesses more integrations than most competitors. In addition, you can easily use hundreds of our free pre-built marketing dashboard templates.
- Unlike Fivetran, Windsor.ai includes built-in marketing attribution software, helping companies analyze the performance of their campaigns while moving and managing their data.
- Windsor.ai platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, ensuring high security and compliance standards.
With these benefits, Windsor.ai provides a powerful data integration solution and advanced marketing insights at an affordable price.
Start your 30-day free trial with Windsor.ai today and enjoy a Fivetran-level data integration experience at a fraction of the cost!
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