Are you trialing Fivetran and any of our 300+ connectors for the next 14 days? Perhaps you’re a brand new customer learning about your Fivetran usage and pricing? 

Either way, this guide will help you understand your usage, monthly costs and how to communicate both with your stakeholders.

Before jumping in, watch this introductory video about Fivetran’s usage-based pricing:

Step 1: Understand monthly active rows

Let’s start by learning about how we define usage.

With Fivetran, you only pay for monthly active rows (MAR). MAR are distinct primary keys that are added, updated or deleted from your source systems to your destination by our connectors that month. A primary key is a unique identifier that specifies a distinct row within a table.

You’re charged only once per month for that row, no matter how many updates you make.

💡 MAR is how Fivetran defines volume. 

Let’s dig into that in a more detailed manner: 

Active = updated, deleted or added.

A row becomes active and counts as a MAR when an existing row is updated, a row is deleted or a new row is added. 

Why deletes count as MAR

Deleting a row in the source removes the primary key. Fivetran registers this change in the column ‘fivetran_deleted’ with the value ‘TRUE’. This delete activates the row, counting as 1 MAR.

Multiple changes to 1 unique row in a month = 1 MAR

A row can be activated only once per month, even if it is updated hundreds or thousands of times in that same month. In the example below, Row 1 was updated on March 2nd, activating the row. The next update - on March 3rd - does not count because the row is already active in March. MAR count resets on the first day of each month.

Learn more: Why MAR is a better measure of value than total rows 

Step 2: Learn how monthly pricing is calculated

Based on your volume (or usage) per month, we calculate your monthly price. 

Total Monthly Usage x Spend Rate = total monthly cost.

Your Spend Rate (aka unit cost) depends on two things:

1. Your volume. The more data you move, the lower your Spend Rate. 
2. Your pricing plan. We have five pricing plans which vary in access to database connectors, advanced security and governance features and sync frequency. Higher plans have higher Spend Rates.

You can view pricing for different volumes and pricing plans on our pricing page. If you’re a customer, you can do this right in your usage estimator or watch a quick demo to learn more.

Each month, we’ll calculate your total monthly cost based on your pricing plan and that month’s usage.

Example monthly pricing on our Starter plan:

*Spend rate is $ per million MAR. 

You’ll notice from this example that as your usage increases, either organically or by adding new sources, your spend rate automatically declines. This means the more you use Fivetran, the more you save. In fact, if you 10x your volume, your cost will only increase 2-4x.

Looking for more examples? Check out different pricing examples for different plans and volumes here.

Step 3: Find out what’s free

Not all usage or features impact your paid MAR. Here are some examples of what’s free and included with Fivetran:

• Initial Sync: The first sync of a new connector with a unique name is free.*
• New Connectors: After completing the initial sync, all activity from a new connector is free for the first 14 calendar days. This period is known as the New Connector Free Use Period, allowing you to estimate MAR consumption.
• Resyncs: Fivetran offers three types of free resyncs, including Customer-triggered Resyncs for Fivetran SaaS, Support-triggered Resyncs and Connector Sync Strategy (ensuring data integrity). It's important to remember that resyncs will drop and recreate your target table, and they are intended to establish parity between your source and target. Each connector’s schema change handling settings can also impact new table delivery. Read our docs for more information.
• New Tables Initial Sync: The first sync for new tables delivered by Fivetran is free. A table is considered new if it wasn't previously available to the connector or if a change requires the connector to deliver a new table to your destination.
• Private Preview Connectors: Every Private Preview connector is free until it moves to Beta. Admins will receive a warning weeks before this update occurs. If you want to participate, check out our monthly posts in Fivetran Community about upcoming connectors in private preview.
• The Fivetran Platform Connector never incurs Paid MAR.
• If your connector creates Fivetran audit tables, these are free.

*👀 IMPORTANT TIP: This means if you delete and recreate a connector with the same name, it does not qualify for a free historical sync. Ensure you always use a unique name when creating a new connector.

Step 4: Get to know your sources and their usage

MAR is different for every source and every business. It’s important to understand how your source systems affect MAR. A thorough understanding can help with provisioning and ensuring expected outcomes.

✏️ General tips for success

1. Use the connector free trial actively to understand how your source data behaves with Fivetran. You can have as many connectors from the same source as you wish.
2. Engage with your source admins on Fivetran usage, so they understand how upstream changes can impact MAR.
3. Note that column additions activate all rows in a table, and automatic schema migrations will bring all new tables that will eventually consume MAR. To avoid new tables and columns unexpectedly activating all rows when they are detected, you can modify your schema change handling settings.
4. Unblocking/unpausing previously-synced tables will incur MAR. When a previously synced table is unpaused, we need to catch up on all the data that hasn’t synced while it was paused. Learn more.
5. Day one of each month typically has higher MAR. Because the MAR counter resets on day one of each month, the first day of the month tends to have a high MAR count for many sources. Subsequent days tend to have lower MAR count because if the row was updated on day one, it is now active, therefore it does not count again for the rest of the month.

Step 5: Bringing this all together - tying cost to value

🎓 Congrats! You’ve learned the ins-and-outs of Fivetran’s usage-based pricing. What’s next?

You’re probably chatting with your internal stakeholders about which sources you want to connect, including budget and costs. But price alone isn’t the full picture — value and total cost of ownership are equally important. Use these email and slack templates to help facilitate those conversations, or ask your team the questions below:

1. What insights have been delivered to the business?
2. How has revenue changed? How have costs been reduced or risks mitigated?
3. How long would it take for us to build and maintain this ourselves?
4. What does it mean for the business to accelerate time-to-insight with pre-built connectors?

Alternatively, share examples of how other teams have reduced overhead costs and accelerated time-to-insight with automated data movement:

1. Taylor Francis avoided hiring four to five additional engineers
2. Docusign saved their engineers 3-6 months of time building pipelines, and 20h per week in maintenance costs
3. Billie.io reduced data warehousing costs by 20 percent.

We hope you enjoyed this guide to Fivetran pricing! If you still have questions, email us at sales@fivetran.com. Or, if you’re new to Fivetran, the best way to find out your pricing is to sign-up for a free trial or book a demo.

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