Many Fivetran customers begin their journey through online purchasing (OLP), which allows them to enter their credit card information via the Fivetran website and immediately become a customer. We introduced this option to remove friction for customers as they get started with their data integration use case. This also enables them to bypass sales teams, evaluate the product themselves and understand their data usage on their own time. 

Often, these customers make the move to an annual plan shortly after seeing the value of the product. While an online purchasing plan offers flexibility, an annual plan offers committed customers a number of benefits, including cost savings, support from a customer success manager, consultation on data infrastructure set up, and scalability as they continue to grow their business. 

We surveyed and spoke with a number of Fivetran users who recently switched to an annual agreement to understand the reasons why they made the commitment. Unsurprisingly, there were a few repeat answers.

Saving money with smarter data management

Our survey results showed that of the customers who have upgraded to our annual plan in the past year, 86 percent indicated cost savings as one of their main motivators. When you change from our online purchasing plan to an annual contract, you receive an automatic 16 percent discount compared to your annualized rate on online purchasing.

Let’s look at an example of a customer using 10 million monthly active rows (MAR) on the Starter plan. With OLP, this would cost the customer $2,380 per month. On an annual plan, the same data usage would cost $2,000 per month with the automatic 16% discount. That’s about two free months worth of usage over the one year period.

Erik Jones, head of BI and Analytics at Hyperscience, told us: 

“At Hyperscience, we use Fivetran for finance, sales, marketing, HR, product and engineering data. I knew our usage was going to grow and having 80 to 90 percent of our sources managed through Fivetran, allows us to solve for consistency and predictability of cost over time, which the annual contract provided."

Guidance and support from a dedicated customer success manager

As an annual customer, you’ll be introduced to a customer success manager. Our customer success managers have experience working with multiple customers across a variety of use cases and industries. These individuals can help you optimize usage, align on implementation, liaise with the support and product team and scale with Fivetran to achieve your desired business outcomes.‍

A team of tech experts at your service

Our customer success team works closely with another valuable resource here at Fivetran: the solution architect team. We know that every customer’s data infrastructure is different, and businesses have their own unique requirements. Implementing and making the most out of Fivetran to meet your specific business needs often requires consulting from a Fivetran expert. 

Our solution architects are a team of highly technical individuals who can consult on your data architecture, security, best practices and upcoming projects. Subscribing to a Resident Solution Architect package is the best way to ensure Fivetran is optimized for you.

Solution architects are particularly important as you set up sources and features that have inherently challenging configurations, such as databases with complex incremental update mechanisms, deploying dbt to transform your raw data into production data, setting up RBAC for data governance, or adding a new technology to your data stack like Databricks, Snowflake or Airflow. Solution architects partner closely with you to understand these business objectives in order to help build and execute plans to achieve success.

Scaling large data volumes with Fivetran

More than a third of customers surveyed indicated rapid data growth as a reason to move to the annual plan. Due to our built-in logarithmic scale, costs will only increase by two to three times even if your data volumes grow by 10 times, making it worthwhile to add more sources. 

Marcelo Soto, who previously set up Fivetran at a large enterprise company, is now tasked with building out a robust data infrastructure at Tül: 

"Given the growth and diverse flows of data we had to work with, we found it impossible to meet the cost predictability our CFO required. But once we established a reliable tendency, we moved to an annual agreement to lock the numbers, get a better deal and provide budget predictability. Right now, we can manage hundreds of connections with only one admin, and our goal is to provide self-managed integration services for every team at Tül, boosting data-driven decisions. As our strategy is long term, it just makes sense to invest [into Fivetran] annually."

Final thoughts

We’ve also seen customers take advantage of purchasing Fivetran through GCP, AWS or Azure Marketplace. On an annual contract, your finance team won't have to worry about varying costs and budgets, or fielding additional invoices. 

“Since we signed a new deal with Google that required a specific spending level, it was an easy decision to move Fivetran into this contract and transition to an annual subscription,” said Mike Kinde, Corporate Operations Manager at Serial 1 Cycle Company.

If you’re currently on OLP and want to learn how your business can benefit from an annual agreement, reach out to sales@fivetran.com.