Understanding the Limits of Usage-Based Pricing for ETL Software

Usage-based pricing has become pervasive in software. Often tied to cloud computing costs for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), this is the predominant pricing model for cloud data warehouses and other data tools.

The premise is straightforward—you, as the customer, pay based on your use/consumption of data passed through or into a software system.

The benefits to users are commonly seen to be:

• Low barrier to entry: You can start with a minimal investment and grow consumption over time.
• Transparency: You know what you will pay for each incremental increase in data consumption.

Many companies, like Fivetran in the ETL software space, position the usage-based pricing model as the better choice for everyone. But is it always the best answer?

Scaling with Fivetran requires vigilance—and deep pockets

Challenges with usage-based pricing start to emerge as data volume grows. This is certainly the case with ETL software.

Data engineers can start using a usage-based ETL tool with little investment. But if they find traction with a tool, they can become victims of their own success.

For instance, starting at 1.5 million Monthly Active Rows (MAR) on a Fivetran Standard plan with five data connections runs about $8,550 annually. If the volume grows to 3 million rows, the price goes up to $17,099—double the original price. At 30 million rows, the cost is $60,000 a year. This can start a trend of repeatedly asking for more money from the IT budget.

One former Fivetran customer planned for 2 to 5 million rows per month. But they consistently encountered budget challenges as they struggled to limit their row consumption. Just one year later, usage grew to 30 million rows per month. The annual cost ballooned from just $5000 to $50,000. It became too much for the business to justify.

Finding available funds and planning for scaled growth in data consumption with the usage model becomes challenging. Engineering managers in this situation often begin looking at expanded data consumption as a cost center rather than a value driver.

Sync provides the predictability to grow data pipelines

CData Sync was built to encourage data consumption. One part of that approach lies in Sync’s deployment and connector flexibility that spans across all architectures. CData’s underlying query engine is also designed to handle large volumes of data with low latency to ensure performance meets your business requirements.

Beyond performance, CData believes that customers should be eager to move to higher data volumes without concern over surprise or ever-growing costs.

Sync’s pricing model is based on the number of connections a customer uses—not by how many rows they use. Our Standard plan has a cap of 100 million monthly rows (and five connections), but at $8,000 per year, that’s 50 times the number of monthly rows that Fivetran provides at the same price.

Sync’s Standard plan provides a low barrier to entry to start building pipelines for a few use cases and prove out the value. And the limited initial cost doesn’t equate to serious limitations in data volume with 100 million monthly rows to extract the most complete data to inform business dashboards.

When Sync customers want to add additional connections, they can plan for and clearly predict new annual pricing. We think that’s more transparent than modeling every possible usage scenario to nail consumption down to the penny.

Beyond 100 million monthly rows, Sync’s Professional and Enterprise tiers feature unlimited rows of data replication. This provides ample incentive to use all the data your organization needs for effective analysis.

The same former Fivetran customer referenced above migrated to Sync. The organization has grown its data volume another tenfold and averages 3 billion rows of replicated data each at a set annual contract price – lower than what they paid Fivetran.

More than 100 Sync customers move 1 billion or more rows of data each month, a volume that would run to six-figure annual bills with a usage-based tool like Fivetran.

More CData Sync advantages over Fivetran

Cost is one of many ways Sync differs from other ETL software. See else how Sync compares to Fivetran to help you quickly deploy robust data replication pipelines between any data source and any database or data warehouse. 

Compare Sync and Fivetran