One meter: monthly active rows
Fivetran does not sell seats or connectors. It counts monthly active rows, meaning every row inserted, updated or deleted in a month, and bills per million on a sliding scale. The more you move, the less each million costs.
The free plan is genuinely usable: 500,000 monthly active rows, 3,500 activation rows and 5,000 model runs a month, with Standard features. A small team with a few steady sources can live there.
The part that catches people out
You do not control monthly active rows. A source system that rewrites a table nightly generates active rows whether or not anything meaningful changed, so the bill can climb while your data does not. There is also a $5 base charge on every standard connection using between 1 and 1 million rows a month, which makes a long tail of small connectors cost more than expected.
Before you sign
Run the estimator with your real row counts, then price the same workload on Airbyte Cloud and on self-hosted Airbyte. Annual contracts save up to 22%, so the discount is real, but it locks in an assumption about volume you may not be able to hold. Ask what happens at renewal if usage doubles.
What it costs by team size
| Team | Plan that fits | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evaluating | Free | $0 | $0 |
| Small team under the free limits | Free | $0 | $0 |
| Past the free limits | Standard | Usage-based, per million rows | Up to 22% off on annual |
| Compliance or residency needs | Enterprise or Business Critical | Quoted | Quoted |
Fivetran publishes no per-plan price. Use its estimator with your own row counts; the plan names above are theirs.