Stop guessing what you’re overpaying for data pipelines. Here’s how to see it in black and white.
Why Fivetran Pricing Stings and Why It Gets Worse Over Time
Before walking through the calculator, it helps to understand why the savings exist.
Fivetran charges based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR). Every row synced counts against your bill. Sounds simple until you realize what that means in practice:
- Your data volume grows as your business grows. More customers, more transactions, more events. Fivetran bills you for all of it.
- Backfills and re-syncs are expensive. When a pipeline fails and needs to recover, you’re paying row charges for data you’ve already synced.
- You can’t control the meter. Schema changes, API retries, and upstream volume spikes all affect your bill in ways that are hard to predict.
Meltano charges for compute time, the actual work your pipelines do. Data volume has no direct cost impact. That means your bill stays predictable as you scale, and backfills don’t trigger surprise invoices.
The difference compounds. A connector syncing 1 billion rows that costs thousands per month on row-based pricing costs a fraction of that on Meltano. That’s the gap the calculator surfaces.
How to Use the Meltano Savings Calculator
The calculator is built around your actual connector usage. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Add Your Connectors
Head to meltano.com/pricingcalculator and start adding the connectors you currently have running in Fivetran. These might be sources like:
- Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads for SaaS marketing
- GA4 for Analytics
- MySQL, Postgres, or other databases which are often the most expensive on row-based pricing
- Any other sources in your current stack
You can add as many connectors as you need. The calculator handles the full picture.
Step 2: Set Your Sync Frequency and MAR
For each connector, configure two inputs:
- Sync frequency — how often the pipeline runs (hourly, daily, weekly)
- MAR (Monthly Active Rows) — the estimated number of rows synced per month
These are the inputs that drive the cost comparison. A connector with high MAR running on an hourly cadence accumulates significant charges under Fivetran’s row-based model. On Meltano, the same connector pays only for its compute time, so high frequency and high volume don’t compound into bill spikes the same way.
Step 3: See Your Savings
Once your connectors are configured, the calculator shows:
- Your estimated Fivetran cost for each connector
- Your estimated Meltano cost for the same connector
- Your total percentage savings across all connectors
The result is a Meltano Savings Report, a connector-by-connector breakdown you can share with your team or use when planning your next renewal conversation.
Savings estimates are based on sync frequency and MAR. Actuals may vary. Contact Meltano for a detailed cost analysis tailored to your use case.
Why the Calculator shows you only the percentage?
The calculator shows percentage savings, not exact Meltano pricing. That’s intentional.
Meltano pricing is scoped to your specific setup, your volume, your connector mix, your orchestration needs. A generic price list would give you a number without context. The savings percentage gives you something more immediately useful: a signal for whether the conversation is worth having.
If the calculator shows you 30-40% savings (which is typical across the connectors we’ve benchmarked), that’s a number worth investigating. If you want the full picture, the “Get in Touch” link on the calculator connects you directly with our team for a detailed analysis.
Why This Matters More at Scale
The calculator is most revealing for teams that have:
- High-volume database connectors. Postgres, MySQL, or similar sources with billions of rows. These are often the biggest cost drivers on row-based pricing and where Meltano’s compute-time model makes the biggest difference.
- Multiple SaaS connectors. Marketing, sales, and ops tools all running in parallel. Each one has its own MAR footprint in Fivetran. On Meltano, the model doesn’t stack up the same way.
- Frequent sync cadences. Teams syncing hourly or near-real-time pay a premium on row-based tools. On Meltano, frequency doesn’t change your cost profile the way it does elsewhere.
Real companies have seen this play out. MVF migrated 1 billion+ rows across 60+ sources and made ETL 7x cheaper. Resident Advisor ended year-long ETL firefighting and reclaimed engineering time. Little Bike Company boosted monthly productivity by 20%. The calculator gives you an early read on whether your situation looks similar.
The Advantages of Meltano Beyond Price
Savings are the headline, but they’re not the whole story. When you move to Meltano, you also get:
Full control over your pipelines. Meltano is code-first and Git-native. Your pipelines live in version control. Changes are reviewed, tested, and promoted through proper CI/CD rather than clicked through a UI with no audit trail.
600+ connectors, open source. Built on the Singer standard, with connectors for databases, SaaS tools, files, and internal systems. And if a connector doesn’t exist, the Meltano SDK makes it straightforward to build one.
No lock-in. Because Meltano is open source at its core, your pipelines aren’t proprietary assets held hostage to a vendor relationship. You own them.
Predictable invoices. Compute-time billing means your bill doesn’t spike when a backfill runs or when your data volume grows with the business. You see the same predictable number month after month.
See What You’re Leaving on the Table
The Meltano Savings Calculator isn’t a demo request or a gated ebook. It’s a tool built for data engineers who want honest numbers, fast.
Add your connectors, set your sync frequency and MAR, and see the gap.
If you want a deeper analysis tailored to your specific stack and data volumes, get in touch and our team will put together a detailed savings report for you.
Meltano is the ETL platform built for data engineers who want dependable data by default. 600+ connectors, compute-time pricing, and full control of your pipelines.