[HN Gopher] Fivetran to acquire Census
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Fivetran to acquire Census
Author : njaremko
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-05-01 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fivetran.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fivetran.com)
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| skadamat wrote:
| The challenge of syncing from stubborn SaaS tools to your
| data warehouse / database I suspect is different than syncing
| data from your data warehouse / database back to SaaS tools.
| Specifically, reverse ETL has to incorporate more context
| from the business I guess so the data that lands in the 3rd
| party tools is actually solid.
|
| Once you have customers and a good network of integrations
| with a large number of tools, I suspect it's easier to just
| buy that company than build it all yourself?
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| The data is only as solid as you make it to be. Ultimately
| reverse ETL is just a technology (basically from SQL to
| APIs). The quality/correctness of data is someone else's
| headache. I've been there and done that, and reverse ETL is
| a feature-product with huge churn. See how Hightouch
| pivoted hard from that into CDP.
| georgewfraser wrote:
| This is exactly right. We even went so far as to build a
| proof of concept internally, and the technical challenges
| are just very different. The simplest way to explain it is
| that Fivetran connects a skinny pipe (APIs) to a fat pipe
| (databases) while Census connects a fat pipe to a skinny
| pipe.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| not a big fan of fivetran's pricing
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Can you say more? Is it the unpredictability, or just too
| expensive?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| They charge based on the highest number of unique rows
| transferred for the month. It gets expensive quickly.
| arjie wrote:
| 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.
| orangechairs wrote:
| Anyone hear rumors of how much they were acquired for?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| 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 7x (7 * 31 = 217 =
| lower bound)
|
| - Hightouch raises $80M on a $1.2B valuation(at ~60x ARR)
|
| - Twilio completes $3.2B acquisition of Segment at ~21x ARR
| (upper multiple bound)
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| 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.
| davidu wrote:
| Congrats to the Census team and the Fivetran team!
| bradleybuda wrote:
| Thanks DU! You've had our back since the early days, thanks for
| taking a chance on us!
| barrrrald wrote:
| Congrats to everyone. Some of the smartest and kindest people in
| data coming together!
| tqi wrote:
| 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?
| buremba wrote:
| 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...
| educasean wrote:
| 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
| stalluri wrote:
| Always wondered FT and Census might come into the each other's
| territory. Good to see both are merging forces together now!
| zoogeny wrote:
| 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?
| loginx wrote:
| Haven't used it personally, but I would suggest looking into
| Apache Hudi
| zoogeny wrote:
| Good to know about but looks more like an open source
| snowflake (e.g. data lake). Fivetran and Census are the
| in/out process layers that bookend the data lake. Although,
| Hudi does look like it has some of that functionality baked
| in.
| paxys wrote:
| A bootstrapped startup needs a MySQL database and a bunch of
| SELECT queries. Everything else is overkill.
| zoogeny wrote:
| Sure, SQL + something like metabase is a decent starting
| point (ideally running on a read-only replica). However,
| there is room to improve over that.
|
| It's like logging. Yeah, there is sentry, papertrail, splunk,
| datadog and the like. But something better than greping sys
| logs is nice and totally reasonable for a startup to standup
| with Kibana/Elastic running on a tiny instance. That can
| provide significantly higher value.
|
| There is a middle ground between stone tools and jet
| aircrafts. I was asking: what are the middle ground tools in
| this space.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Airbyte is probably the best opensource tool in this space.
| zoogeny wrote:
| Cheers, that is what I was thinking must exist but didn't
| know about.
| iflores12 wrote:
| Airbyte gave us more headaches than it was worth. But if you
| can get it to work for you, it's probably the closest you'll
| get to Fivetran in the open-source tool space
| ssharp wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| Or batch massive rows? JSON structures in-database go a long
| way...
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| zoogeny wrote:
| Yes, I've used Fivetran at VC funded startups that I worked
| at and I understand the value of not having to build this
| piece of common infrastructure. Although we did experience
| regular (probably once every couple of months) issues with
| our ETL getting out of sync. We even had to do a full re-sync
| on a couple of occasions (which to their credit they did for
| no charge).
|
| As I said, I totally understand this market and why these
| companies are valuable. I respect the work they do. But while
| I am a tiny, tiny startup I don't want to lock in to anything
| and I know I can handle the amount of data myself with little
| effort if I have a basic open source alternative I can manage
| myself.
| caust1c wrote:
| 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
| zoogeny wrote:
| Interesting, it looks like redpanda is a Kafka replacement
| and redpanda connect is a Kafka connect replacement but with
| a supported set of connectors (sources and sinks). I (once
| upon a time) had to write a Kafka connector myself so I get
| the general idea.
|
| To be honest, I hadn't really given much thought about what
| event streaming I would use anyway. So I imagine using
| redpanda along with redpanda connect could be that layer (I
| was considering just using Redis streams or even PostgreSQL)
| and then there is just another redpanda connector for the db
| to add into that mix. If someone is starting from scratch
| that might be a good path. But I agree the MIT license of
| warpstream is a bit nicer if all you need is the connectors.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| 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
| film42 wrote:
| 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.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Is Fivetran to Fortran like what C++ is to C?
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