Fivetran to acquire Census

[zoogeny]

All of these tools are insanely expensive (from my own experience at companies that have used them). I understand it, since building your own pipeline to handle the kind of throughput analytics takes is expensive and time consuming. Business leaders want the visibility but don't want to redirect dev resources to build and maintain these creaky data pipelines. It is the perfect market of high-value and low tolerance for build (on the build or buy spectrum).

But I am not going to pay $1000/month as a bootstrap startup. What open source alternatives exist that can be run on basic hardware?

[mritchie712]

The best open source options are Airbyte and Meltano / Singer. But it's hard to keep them running. If you self-host them, you'll hit issues at least a few times a month which can each take a few hours to solve.

It's not like running Postgres which "just works". When you self-host Airbyte, you're still building a good bit.

I felt the same way about the cost of data tools. Paying $1,000 for Fivetran, $2,000 for Snowflake, $2,000 for Looker seemed crazy. We bundle all three for $500 / month at https://www.definite.app

[ssharp]

I'm not sure about Census but Fivetran's free plan has met my needs to sync data from different ad platforms to BigQuery pretty well.

One of their pitfalls is charging by the row. If you're cost-conscious, you really need to watch what data you're syncing and you need to pare it down quite a bit during the 2-week period they give you when setting up a new connector. If you do all that though, you can get a lot of mileage out of the free plan for some use cases.

[morkalork]

Ok if you're bootstrap it probably doesn't make sense but otherwise fivetran is fantastic for not having to deal with a boatload of third parties constant API updates and changes. If your core competency is something else entirely and not doing ETL, then it's worth paying for so you're not wasting time on doing that ETL work.

[caust1c]

Check out redpanda connect / warpstream bento (depending on your license needs). Both came out of what was benthos.

https://github.com/redpanda-data/connect

https://github.com/warpstreamlabs/bento

[themanmaran]

Airbyte is probably the best opensource tool in this space.

[doctorpangloss]

Palantir's market cap is $274b and they make glorified dashboards. There's just too much money in it to spend cycles doing it for free.

[paxys]

A bootstrapped startup needs a MySQL database and a bunch of SELECT queries. Everything else is overkill.

[banditelol]

I've tried airbyte, sling, and dlt (besides building several tools from scratch)

My best bet for now will be dlt if you have dedicated DE team, but sling will get you a long way for moving data around your warehouse

[loginx]

Haven't used it personally, but I would suggest looking into Apache Hudi

[buremba]

This indeed sounds like closing the loop, congrats to the team! Boris’s announcement is pretty interesting: https://www.getcensus.com/blog/census-joins-forces-with-five...

[barrrrald]

Congrats to everyone. Some of the smartest and kindest people in data coming together!

[_dark_matter_]

Seems like a no-brainer. I wonder if they ever started to build these capabilities in house; I'm sure they already had so much of the tooling available.

[mritchie712]

Yeah, I was always curious why Fivetran didn't build this themselves when reverse-ETL started to take off.

I built a company[0], SeekWell, in this space (launched before Census), but was mostly focused on Sheets and Slack as destinations. SeekWell was acquired a few years ago too.

0 - https://seekwell.io/

[educasean]

Congrats to both Census and Fivetran. Census has an amazing product and very good people. Excited to see what's coming next from y'all

[orangechairs]

Anyone hear rumors of how much they were acquired for?

[mritchie712]

I'd guess a little north of $500 million.

- Census last raised $60M Series B at a $630M valuation (upper bound)

- Census’s estimated annual revenue is $31.6 million with ~200 employees.

- Median private-SaaS EV/ARR multiple is 7× (7 * 31 = 217 = lower bound)

- Hightouch raises $80M on a $1.2B valuation(at ~60× ARR)

- Twilio completes $3.2B acquisition of Segment at ~21× ARR (upper multiple bound)

[tpoacher]

Is Fivetran to Fortran like what C++ is to C?

[bicx]

It’s like what Cantonese is to cantaloupe

[tqi]

What does this actually mean for customers? Is are we going to have to rebuild our Census syncs in Fivetran or will the product continue to run as-is? Will plans / pricing change?

[davidu]

Congrats to the Census team and the Fivetran team!

[bradleybuda]

Thanks DU! You've had our back since the early days, thanks for taking a chance on us!

[r1290]

Fivetran has been great. But in this new ai world. Something like dragster + dlt and sling. You can have your own fivetran developed in house. I haven’t dove too much into reverse etl- but it would be awesome to see a dtl like open source tool for reverse etl.

[r1290]

Fivetran should’ve done this a long time ago. I think that both etl and reverse etl is going open source route. With this ai world we live in now. You just need dagster or temporal - and a few lines of python.

[danscan]

This page is a great example of why FCP perf is important. It took a scenery long for any content to appear, and I bounced off the page pretty quickly a few times thinking it was down.

I can’t be the only one

[throwaway7783]

Still missing a critical piece - ETL. If they acquire it instead of just asking people to use dbt, they have (kinda) the full stack solution.

[stalluri]

Always wondered FT and Census might come into the each other's territory. Good to see both are merging forces together now!

[film42]

Congrats to the teams! Like others have said, your pricing ends up killing adoption for my company. We ended up self-hosting Airbyte. It ain't perfect but at least we're not paying $10/GB to replicate data within our own VPC.

[mritchie712]

there's going to be more consolidation in data tooling this year. Many of the stand alone tools raised too much money and no one wants to buy 5 really expensive tools to assemble a "data stack" anymore.

if you want a data platform that's built to work as one cohesive unit, we got you: https://www.definite.app/

Definite has a data lake, ETL, and BI in one app.

[tschellenbach]

not a big fan of fivetran's pricing

[arjie]

I run a professional services org that helps you switch to an open source alternative. We'll host the solution for you if you want and aim to be drop-in Fivetran compatible in your workflows with a transition plan so you can run the thing if you'd like. Pricing is flexible. Personal email in profile.

[throwaway7783]

Can you say more? Is it the unpredictability, or just too expensive?