Your data bill shouldn't keep growing.
Pay for compute. Not rows.

A compute hour is the time Meltano's managed infrastructure spends actively running your pipelines, extracting data from a source, loading it to a destination, or transforming it. A connector that takes 30 minutes to sync and runs twice a day uses about 30 hours a month. Most small teams with 5–10 connectors syncing daily fall comfortably within the Starter tier (200 hrs/mo). If you're unsure, book a demo and our team will estimate your footprint before you commit.

Meltano Open is the self-hosted, open-source version, you get 600+ connectors and Git-native pipelines, but you manage your own infrastructure, monitoring, and uptime. Meltano Cloud (Starter, Growth, Scale and Enterprise) is fully managed offering where Meltano runs the infrastructure, handles scaling, monitors pipeline health, and provides engineering support depending on your plan. Open is great for experimentation, but Cloud is built for production teams.

Yes. Plans are designed to scale with you. From Starter through Enterprise, each tier unlocks more compute hours, more workspaces, and higher levels of engineering support. You can upgrade at any point and your existing pipelines, connectors, and configurations carry over without migration.

Growth includes 8 hours/month and Scale includes 15 hours/month of direct access to Meltano's engineering team. You can use these hours to get help building custom connectors, debugging pipeline failures, optimising sync performance, or reviewing your architecture. It's embedded engineering support, not a support ticket queue.

Fivetran and similar tools price based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR), meaning your bill grows directly with data volume, which can spike unpredictably. Meltano prices on compute time, which is far more predictable and typically 40–80% cheaper for teams running database or bulk connectors at high frequency. The more data you move, the wider the gap becomes. If you’re already on Fivetran and curious how much you can save with Meltano, check our Savings Estimator

Yes. Every plan (including Open) gives you access to Meltano's full library of 600+ connectors. The plans differ in compute capacity, workspaces, managed infrastructure, and support, not in which connectors you can use.

A workspace is an isolated environment for a set of pipelines, typically mapped to a team, client, project, or environment (prod vs staging). Starter gives you 25, Growth gives 100, and both Scale and Enterprise gives unlimited. If you're an agency running pipelines for multiple clients, or a larger org separating pipelines by business unit, you'll want to factor workspace limits into your plan choice.

Enterprise is fully custom setup. It includes everything in Scale plus connectors built specifically for your sources (if they're not already in the library), a custom SLA with uptime guarantees, custom engineering hours negotiated to your needs, and dedicated account management. It's designed for organisations with complex, high-volume, or compliance-sensitive data workflows where off-the-shelf plans aren't enough.