Fivetran to acquire Census

by njaremkoon 5/1/2025, 4:41 PMwith 50 comments

by zoogenyon 5/1/2025, 7:54 PM

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?

by burembaon 5/1/2025, 7:12 PM

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...

by barrrraldon 5/1/2025, 6:41 PM

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

by _dark_matter_on 5/1/2025, 5:31 PM

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.

by educaseanon 5/1/2025, 7:32 PM

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

by orangechairson 5/1/2025, 5:37 PM

Anyone hear rumors of how much they were acquired for?

by tpoacheron 5/1/2025, 10:41 PM

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

by tqion 5/1/2025, 6:54 PM

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?

by daviduon 5/1/2025, 6:36 PM

Congrats to the Census team and the Fivetran team!

by r1290on 5/2/2025, 3:45 AM

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.

by r1290on 5/2/2025, 3:51 AM

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.

by danscanon 5/2/2025, 6:09 PM

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

by throwaway7783on 5/1/2025, 6:13 PM

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.

by stallurion 5/1/2025, 7:48 PM

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

by film42on 5/1/2025, 8:17 PM

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.

by mritchie712on 5/1/2025, 6:24 PM

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.

by tschellenbachon 5/1/2025, 5:32 PM

not a big fan of fivetran's pricing