“Most people here are analytics engineers in smaller companies. For them, Fivetran is a much needed tool. We built our own tools for data ingestion in our organization as we have a large team”
“Unfortunately, some sources fight us because they want to sell a built in “data warehouse export” feature, and even if their users want to use Fivetran for that purpose, they want to force them to use the built in capability :(”
“Fivetran is definitely not the greatest. But as the only data engineer…being able to plug in an api key and get data loaded goes a long way towards getting people their dashboards “in a week or so””
“even better, now I wanna raise the stakes and get a struggling Fivetran + dbt customer blowing up their Snowflake bill off the mess to something real.”
“I think Fivetran's sweet-spot is for high-variety / low-velocity / low-staff teams where you can leverage their knowledge and service and have nowhere near the staff to do it yourself. But as your volumes increase it can get very expensive.”
“That is, until you realize last year's Fivetran budget alone is close to matching the entire cost of Snowflake AND the salary of an engineer. Not so attractive then, especially given how relatively bad the Fivetran product is.”
“The whole model is scammy no matter how big your company is. You are paying Fivetran to "keep an eye on" however many rows you have syncing in your source databases. Each month, if you only have 5% of rows actually updating in some way, you are paying the same as someone who has 100% of rows updating.”
“Easy for the end user maintaining it, disastrous if you actually have to maintain the end to end data practice at your company and some SaaS vendor is siphoning your money and changing columns in your warehouse willy nilly.”
“Fivetran created a great mid-market product that was best in class and had wide adoption. What they didn't have was a very customizable product designed for large enterprises where their one size fits all strategy doesn't work.”
“Dumb valuation aside, Airbyte seems like it will wipe the floor with Fivetran and other pay-per-record data pipelining tools. Open source, decent community, you can host it yourself...”
“Stitch can do a lot of the simple replication stuff for cheaper. Fivetran, apparently, is going to change their bonkers billing stuff (only 2-3 years old iirc) because they are losing customers over it.”
“Be careful with fivetran - they inflate your data and then bill you for it. In our case, they inflated by ~10x the record count by doing a join between two tables/endpoints which wasn’t required for data integrity.”
“Unrelated to the article itself but Fivetran has the worst possible product from a developer perspective, their APIs are unreliable and will fail on you randomly.”
“I have a weird vibe with Fivetran, Snowflake and Looker together as a combo with their credit based billing. Those three tools provide a platform that makes it easy to forget about engineering things correctly and just throwing money at the problem. It’s makes it so easy to do really dumb expensive things.”
“Its a great stack and works well together. Ingest with Fivetran, transform with DBT and store in Snowflake. Simple, serverless, consumption based pricing etc.”
“I remember when Fivetran came out years ago and it was a big improvement over the competition at the time. It made a particular kind of work easier, so you would hopefully know about it if that’s what you did for a living.”
“When I emerged earlier this year back into the world of normal companies, I realized there was a sort of holy trinity of companies that has completely dominated the analytics SaaS market: Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt. I had only heard of Snowflake before.”
“I used FiveTran at a former company and it was utterly boring. We set it up to do what it does and then would stop by once a month to see if it was okay and it always was.”
“Part of the reason why I haven’t invested that much time into figuring out Fivetran is that I didn’t configure it. I have made changes to connectors when there have been issues.”
“In a situation like this, if fivetran is breaking, you should dive into why it’s breaking, how fivetran works, what connectors need troubleshooting and what that entails, etc. Doing this will help demystify fivetran to an extent and build your technical knowledge base.”
“\`Those connectors should not be constantly breaking if set up correctly. And because those no/low-code solutions eliminate organizational silos, they will inevitably continue to become more common. Still, if you get fed up with Fivetran, check out:”
“I think the best part about 5tran is the ability to rapidly prototype. We would quickly add 5 connectors in a day and start testing out the data, and not spend any engineer hours on it before we decided that some data source is essential.”
“Fivetran has built all the custom OAuth flows for their 150 custom integrations and you can build it into your own (internal or external) applications, it is neat. @goergewfraser When do you plan to add the ability to configure connectors that need extra config after the initial connection, e.g.”
“Fivetran functions are a nice escape hatch but none of the users we talked to mentioned those. They always mentioned building inhouse for missing connectors. My interpretation is that this is too much of a vendor lock-in for a cloud-based product.”
“It seems like app flow cost more than our current usage of stitch or even fivetran to our redshift warehouse and doesn’t even include some of our bigger other sources we use (MySQL, stripe). I am gonna do more analysis on this and see if this can be a potential cost saver for us in the longer.”