“If Fivetran acquires dbt Labs, companies using dbt but not Fivetran could face vendor lock-in, reduced focus on standalone dbt features and pressure to adopt Fivetran’s ecosystem to stay fully compatible. This may limit flexibility, force reevaluation of their data stack and push them to consider alternative solutions.”
“They will probably get some fivetran equity to stay on. Probably not generational wealth exit but should be comfy to buy a big house in Philly suburbs.”
“Fivetran doesn't need to save money or anything. They need to be pretty enough to IPO. Buy dbt labs, corner the market, assume their ARR looks pretty for IPO and exit.”
“Since the exorbitant price changes in march, many SF reps are looking for alternatives. Fivetrans pricing is now becoming a drag on consumption. Not surprising FT had to do something, they raised at a crazy valuation at the peak of 2021 which they’re unlikely to ever hit again in this lifetime.”
“Haha me too, dbt is very popular in EU, Ofcourse dbt core not cloud, but I have heard any of the companies I have been working with or interviewed for use Fivetran.”
“The acquisition of SQLMesh not long ago puts some interesting technical glue in the middle but they would benefit greatly from the dbt customer base.”
“It’s the only viable alternative to dbt.Of late fivetran’s service for us has been terrible. Connectors failing. Support taking weeks to fix things. I guess we will see what they do with them?”
“They will do exactly what dbt did. Push hard as open-core then when they have enough marketshare, rug pull and begin to "extract value." It is the tried and true playbook.”
“Fivetran will save you setup and maintenance pain, but you're right that the post-load transform model kills you for PII compliance. There's just no way around that unless you front it with a proxy or pre-processor, which kinda defeats the point of Fivetran.”
“Fivetran works great for many SAAS apps, has tons of connectors, great monitoring, keeps track of schema changes on the Saas Vendor side, and handles the changes automatically. They're close to 0 intervention when it comes to managing schema changes.”
“If you aren’t looking to code up your own internal data extraction solution or don’t have access to a reasonably sized team of developers to build it all, Fivetran will do most of what you’ve specified. It does field masking on the fly, has native connectors for business applications like those and can perform high volume extracts for very chatty databases.”
“Fivetran handles retries better but if something silently fails or rows get dropped, you may not know until you are paged. We had a few late night surprises there.”
“Fivetran's pricing became quite high after they raised their rates, and that pushed us to look for alternatives. I’d say both tools did the job, but [Skyvia tool] (https://skyvia.com/) offered a simpler and more cost-effective pricing model.”
“Fivetran seems quick to set up with solid connectors but their transforms (like PII masking) happen post load which breaks our compliance rules. SCD2 would mean custom dbt jobs, adding cost and complexity.”
“I remember waiting for days for Fivetran to respond to support tickets, which cost us a fair bit of revenue a couple times. Hevo's support was definitely a lot more responsive.”
“The MAR model already catches a lot of teams off-guard, and adding per-connector pricing just compounds it. Curious: when you moved to Hevo, did you notice any differences in connector reliability or support compared to Fivetran?”
“The problem with usage based pricing is that it seems low at start and then it increases rapidly as you scale. You will see this with other products like Hubspot as well.”
“Fivetran has a huge library of connectors however so it might still be the feasible option if OP needs it to connect to tools others are not using. (I don't see it being the case here).”
“I've been reading some of the negatives here about Fivetran, but honestly, I tried their trial version and it gave me a monthly estimate of $50 USD, which is far cheaper than other alternatives. Any other suggestions?”
“Fivetran is ideal when you’re happy paying for hands-off syncs, Airbyte fits if you need to fork and hack new API sources, DLT makes sense for code-first shops that test everything in Git. LLMs can spit out connector scaffolds or dbt models, but they won’t babysit retries, quotas, or schema drift, so pick the runtime you’re willing to patch.”