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Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

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. (I.e. there was a “balloons” endpoint and a “parties” endpoint and fivetran synced a non-existing “party_balloons” table.)

We dumped them once our first credit purchase ran empty.

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We have been with them for 2+ years and are moving away from them. Great product but absolute nightmare on pricing transparency. Every year the contract is a fight with their bait-and-switch. Every year they try and double our price saying they changed their pricing model and we have not increased usage. Sales people are horrible and don't trust them at all. If you are a small company with a tight budget I'd stay away.

[I work at Fivetran]

Which connector was that?

You can turn off tables you’re not interested in, but perhaps this was a bug.

I can confirm I've encountered this as well. In our case it was with shopify. There are some product_* tables that cannot be turned off without turning off product entirely and they can be incredibly expensive to sync. It's a very poor experience compared to something like airbyte where you pretty much get full control and can even edit the connectors if you have the dev manpower. The fact that adding new tables to your schema is on by default also really rubs me the wrong way. If you don't disable this or very closely monitor what new tables get added a reasonable connector can suddenly balloon in costs.

That and connector hell. No thanks, I'm out.

I'm curious, what does "connector hell" mean in this context from a practical point of view?

https://www.fivetran.com/connectors

what did you go for instead?

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.

oh i didnt know that. has the billing change been talked anywhere or is this rumor for now?

https://www.fivetran.com/blog/fivetran-pricing

Yeah Stitch is great and far more affordable.

Some weird limitations around postgres and datatypes (BC dates will clog it), but if you actually validate your data you won't have any problems.

We have been a fivetran subscriber for close to 5 years, and I think every year we have renewed it has been a completely new billing model.

we switched to self hosted meltano.

We switched to stitch for the endpoints and an in-house Google cloud function to consume events as a webhook.

if you (or anyone else) is looking for data sync (etl and reverse-etl) please email me, I'm working on a startup that might be of interest to you.

i meaannn… i work at airbyte haha. happy to do a friendly chat if it’d be useful to you (im curious what motivates you to do this startup in a pretty crowded field)

Hah — crowded indeed :-)

Airbyte has an interesting product worth checking out. Open source, also has a saas offering.

yup! here's how we think about the data integration problem. https://airbyte.com/blog/data-integration

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