For both data teams and business leaders, the cost of data integration isn’t just about what you spend, but about what it enables (or delays). With rising demand for analytics, AI, and real-time insights, the pressure is on to build fast, maintain less, and deliver value across the business. Enterprises choose Fivetran not just for its technology but for its strategic value.
This guide breaks down how Fivetran delivers measurable return on investment (ROI), reduces total cost of ownership (TCO), and scales with your business — turning data movement from a resource drain into a value engine.
What does Fivetran do? A fully managed data movement platform
Fivetran is not just an ETL tool. It’s a fully managed data movement platform designed to solve many data integration and movement challenges so that your team can focus on high-impact work.
How Fivetran maximizes your data budget:
- 14-day free usage for any new connection (instance of a connector)
- Free resyncs and historical syncs
- Discounting on annual contracts
- Easy usage analytics in the UI
- Efficient data loading for lower ingestion compute costs (ref Gigaom stats + free ingest for data lakes - see last part)
- Idempotence, ensuring automatic recovery from failed syncs
- According to GigaOm research, Fivetran Managed Data Lake Service, which includes free ingestion compute, saves users 90-95% of compute ingestion costs
How Fivetran drives business value
- 700+ prebuilt connectors for SaaS apps, databases, event streams, and files, each of which can be tried for free for a period of 14 days
- Support for custom data sources through an SDK that can readily be combined with AI copilots
- Change data capture (CDC) for real-time, incremental updates
- Automated schema drift handling — no manual intervention required
- Built-in transformations with dbt-native workflows
- Support for data warehouses, data lakes, and vector databases as destinations
- Support for reverse ETL and data activation
- Global infrastructure with 24/7 support and SLAs
- Enterprise-grade compliance: SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR
- 99.9% uptime, ensured by engineering and global support teams of 500+
The upshot is that, in place of building a bespoke data architecture and pipelines over months and maintaining it indefinitely, a data team can set up Fivetran out of the box, begin syncing data in a matter of minutes, and fully outsource and automate the maintenance of data pipelines. Fivetran works and scales with the needs of your organization, offering an alternative to using scarce engineering and analytical resources to build and maintain tens or hundreds of data pipelines.
“The use of Fivetran changed the way Oldcastle Infrastructure thinks about data it’s an asset, not just a by-product of a process. By delivering cross-company metrics across the entire organization, we have been able to realize multimillion-dollar ROI year over year."
— Nick Heigerick, IT Manager of BI
How Fivetran’s pricing model works (and how it supports ROI)
Fivetran’s pricing model is usage-based, with customers only paying for actual data movement. This means:
- Initial and historical syncs are free
- Pricing is based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR): the unique rows added or updated per month
- You benefit from volume discounts as you scale
You only pay for actual data movement, not compute or storage. To facilitate the usage of individual connectors at scale, the unit cost of each MAR decreases based on the volume of usage per connector, rather than per account.
“Fivetran was six or seven times less expensive than hiring someone to manage all the data pipelines we wanted.”
— Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations at Paylocity
There are 4 pricing tiers:
- Free: Up to 500K MARs + 5,000 transformation runs/month
- Standard: Core functionality for most businesses
- Enterprise: Advanced governance, performance, and customization
- Business Critical: Highest availability, regulatory compliance, and dedicated support
Annual contracts can reduce costs by up to 36.4% depending on tier and usage, with the steepest discounts applying at the highest tiers and levels of usage. We believe strongly that the business value of data is directly related to its quality, variety, and scale.
Your spend rate – aka unit cost – depends on the volume of the data you move through each connector, as well as the pricing plan. For more details, you can look at our pricing page and experiment with the pricing estimator.
"Previously, building pipelines took weeks, and integrating new systems could take years. With Fivetran, we can onboard systems and deliver dashboards in a fraction of that time. Extracting simple data used to take over an hour — now, it takes under 10 minutes, giving the business near real-time access to the data they need, thanks to Fivetran."
— Suvarna Yenugudhati, Data Platform Lead at Scape
Fivetran lets you invest in your data
The alternatives to Fivetran are DIY data pipelines, open source tools, and budget tools. Each pose a number of challenges and hidden costs.
DIY pipelines:
- Long build/maintenance cycles
- No automated schema handling or error recovery
- Engineers diverted from high-impact work (ML, analytics, automation)
Open source tools:
- No SLAs, support, or compliance guarantees
- Requires heavy internal tooling and monitoring
- Security and observability left to the team
Budget tools:
- Basic syncs, no true CDC
- Limited connectors and observability
- Features like governance and SLAs often cost extra
For each alternative, your data team assumes considerable risk and responsibility in terms of managing your organization’s infrastructure and dealing with the unpredictability of usage and billing across technologies and cloud environments.
More importantly, any coding- and configuration-heavy alternatives come at a tremendous opportunity cost by consuming the time and effort of engineers and analysts. Technical talent should pursue high-impact, value-driving work, building and deploying data products of all kinds.
Fivetran vs. competitors: Features, benefits, and capabilities
Fivetran leads the industry with ease of use, a diverse catalog of over 700 supported sources and destinations, and 99.97% uptime.
Compared to low-code alternatives like Airbyte, Hevo, Rivery, Estuary, and Windsor.ai, Fivetran offers several key advantages:
On the other end of the spectrum, enterprise-centric tools like Informatica, Matillion, and Qlik Talend often require extensive infrastructure management, configuration, and coding. These tools typically began as on-premises, pre-cloud offerings, and it shows – they are inherently more complicated, requiring specialized expertise to use, and raising long-term TCO.
How companies improve ROI and lower TCO with Fivetran
Companies of all sizes, industries, and locales choose Fivetran to radically simplify and accelerate data integration:
- Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer used Fivetran to speed up clinical trials using real-time visibility into clinical trial supply chains as well as enable data accessibility and sharing across the enterprise.
- National Australia Bank, Australia’s premier financial institution, cut data ingestion costs by 50% while boosting the performance of machine learning and reports by 30%.
- Observability platform New Relic saved an estimated $500,000 using Fivetran to automate data integration, centralize financial data, and deploy a new pricing model.
- Chile’s flagship mining and chemicals company, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM), can now deploy data pipelines in 1% of the time and expand operations in new overseas markets.
Customers routinely save the labor equivalent of multiple full-time engineers, and the savings scale with the complexity and volume of an organization’s data operations.
Fivetran unlocks ROI and reduces TCO at scale
Fivetran turns your data platform into a competitive advantage. By eliminating the cost and complexity of pipeline management, your teams move faster, innovate more, and deliver measurable business impact, from faster reporting to smarter ML and AI use cases.
Choosing Fivetran isn’t about paying for another tool. It’s about investing in outcomes: accelerated insight, freed-up technical time, and a data foundation built to scale.
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