SourceMedium vs Fivetran

Why teams choose SourceMedium over Fivetran

Fivetran is data plumbing — it extracts data from sources and loads it into a warehouse. That's it. No transformation, no dashboards, no attribution, no AI, no ecommerce-specific business metrics. No LTV calculations, no contribution margin, no cohort analysis. These must all be built from scratch using dbt and a separate BI tool, on a warehouse you provision and pay for separately.

Mid-size ecommerce brands typically pay $3K–$8K/month for Fivetran alone — and that's before the warehouse, dbt, and BI tool.

Where the approaches differ

Data plumbing vs a data platform: Fivetran gives you pipes. SourceMedium gives you pipes, models, compute, templates, and AI together. One bill replaces six vendor invoices — no separate warehouse, no BI tool, no reverse ETL, no engineering overhead.

MAR pricing punishes ecommerce data: Fivetran's Monthly Active Rows pricing is particularly expensive for ecommerce. A single Shopify order generates 20+ rows after normalization. Ad platforms like Meta and Google Ads constantly update historical metrics through rollback syncs, generating ongoing MAR charges users call the "#1 cost driver." The March 2025 shift to per-connector billing eliminated bulk discounts, causing 40–70% cost increases — some users reported 4–8x price hikes. SourceMedium's pricing is predictable — no MAR surprises, no per-connector billing. Generous base compute included, with simple usage-based pricing for heavy BigQuery or AI workloads.

The Fivetran + dbt merger: Fivetran acquired dbt Labs in October 2025, approaching $600M combined ARR. The pricing implications are concerning — one commenter captured it: "Fivetran recently raised prices 4–8x for some customers. Now they're acquiring dbt. You don't need a crystal ball to see where this might go."

Dedicated support, not a ticket queue: Every SourceMedium customer gets a named Customer Solutions Analyst — US-based, with hands-on DTC experience across marketing, ops, finance, and executive teams. Solution hours are included in your plan, scoped during the sales process so the highest-value work fits within what's already budgeted. No offshore support teams, no $250/hr professional services surprises, no "implementation packages" as a separate line item. If you need additional hours, pricing is transparent — and you always have the option to resource work with your own team instead.

What you still need to buy: Fivetran alone is $3K–$8K/month for ecommerce data volumes. Then add a warehouse ($500–$1K/mo), dbt Cloud ($100–$500/mo), a BI tool ($3K–$5K/mo), reverse ETL ($500–$1.5K/mo), and 1–2 analytics engineers ($120K–$360K/year). Total: $200K–$500K/year, plus 6–18 months of build time.

You bring the analysis tools you already know: BigQuery is the destination — Tableau, dbt, Python, Hex, anything that speaks SQL connects directly. No export workarounds, no vendor lock-in. Store everything — ecommerce, finance, ops — in one warehouse with included compute at no extra storage cost.

2,500+ quality checks vs no data quality: Fivetran moves data but doesn't verify it. When source APIs change — and Shopify, Meta, and Google Ads APIs change multiple times per year — pipelines break. Each vendor blames the other. SourceMedium runs 2,500+ automated quality checks daily across every source. When your numbers reconcile back to Shopify and your ad platforms, you stop debating data in meetings.

Reporting included, not sold separately: Fivetran has no reporting layer. SourceMedium includes Looker Studio templates you can fork and customize — no Looker license, no development time, no separate BI bill.

AI that understands ecommerce: Fivetran has no analytics or AI capability — it moves data, period. SourceMedium's AI Analyst answers questions about attribution, LTV, and cohort performance in Slack, showing the SQL behind every answer so you can verify it in BigQuery.

When Fivetran might be the better fit

Fivetran works for organizations with dedicated data engineering teams that need a broad connector platform for enterprise-wide data consolidation — hundreds of SaaS sources, database replication, or multi-department infrastructure where ecommerce is just a minor component of a much larger enterprise data infrastructure. Many SourceMedium customers use BigQuery as the hub for both SourceMedium-managed ecommerce data and Fivetran-loaded non-ecommerce sources — so it's not always either/or.