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Fivetran to acquire Census
- r1290 1y agoFivetran 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.
- _dark_matter_ 1y agoSeems 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 1y agoYeah, 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/ https://seekwell.io/
- skadamat 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agonot a big fan of fivetran's pricing
- throwaway7783 1y agoCan you say more? Is it the unpredictability, or just too expensive?
- rawgabbit 1y agoThey charge based on the highest number of unique rows transferred for the month. It gets expensive quickly.
- arjie 1y agoI 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 1y agoAnyone hear rumors of how much they were acquired for?
- mritchie712 1y agoI'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)
- DropkickM16 1y agolol
- throwaway7783 1y agoStill 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 1y agothere'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/ https://www.definite.app/ Definite has a data lake, ETL, and BI in one app.
- davidu 1y agoCongrats to the Census team and the Fivetran team!
- bradleybuda 1y agoThanks DU! You've had our back since the early days, thanks for taking a chance on us!
- tqi 1y agoWhat 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?
- barrrrald 1y agoCongrats to everyone. Some of the smartest and kindest people in data coming together!
- buremba 1y agoThis 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-fivetran https://www.getcensus.com/blog/census-joins-forces-with-five...
- educasean 1y agoCongrats to both Census and Fivetran. Census has an amazing product and very good people. Excited to see what's coming next from y'all
- throwaway314155 1y ago[flagged]
- stalluri 1y agoAlways wondered FT and Census might come into the each other's territory. Good to see both are merging forces together now!
- zoogeny 1y agoAll 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 1y agoHaven't used it personally, but I would suggest looking into Apache Hudi
- zoogeny 1y agoGood 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 1y agoA bootstrapped startup needs a MySQL database and a bunch of SELECT queries. Everything else is overkill.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zoogeny 1y agoSure, 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.
- film42 1y agoCongrats 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 1y agoIs Fivetran to Fortran like what C++ is to C?
- bicx 1y agoIt’s like what Cantonese is to cantaloupe
- r1290 1y agoFivetran 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.
- danscan 1y agoThis 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