You have a warehouse. Now you need data in it. Ingestion is the EL in ELT — Extract from your sources, Load into your warehouse. The transformation comes later.
The two tools that matter for startups are Fivetran and Airbyte. They solve the same problem differently.
What you are actually doing
Every SaaS tool your company uses — Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, Postgres, Zendesk — has an API. Ingestion tools connect to those APIs, extract the data on a schedule, and load it into your warehouse in a usable schema.
Without an ingestion tool, you are writing API connectors yourself. That is a full-time job, and it is the wrong thing to spend engineering time on.
Fivetran vs Airbyte for startups
Fivetran is fully managed. You connect a source, choose a sync frequency, and it runs. Schema changes in the source propagate automatically. When Salesforce updates its API, Fivetran fixes the connector. You never touch it again.
The cost is real — pricing is based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR), and high-volume sources like HubSpot or Salesforce can generate large counts. A typical startup syncing 4–6 sources might spend $500–$2,000/month.
Airbyte is open-source. The self-hosted version is free (you pay for infrastructure, typically $200–$500/month on a small Kubernetes cluster). Airbyte Cloud is a managed option at lower cost than Fivetran for most use cases.
The tradeoff: Airbyte requires more engineering. Schema drift handling needs configuration. Upgrades are your responsibility on the self-hosted version. Community connectors vary in quality.
What most startups should do
Start with Fivetran. The time-to-value is unmatched. You can have Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, and your production Postgres database syncing into your warehouse in an afternoon. No infrastructure, no connector maintenance.
When your Fivetran bill hits $3,000–$5,000/month and you have a platform engineer on the team, evaluate Airbyte Cloud or self-hosted. The economics change significantly at that point.
Do not start with Airbyte self-hosted if you have fewer than two data engineers. The maintenance overhead will distract from higher-value work.
What to sync first
Start with the sources that answer your most urgent business questions. Common first connectors for B2B SaaS:
| Source | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Salesforce or HubSpot | Pipeline, conversion rates, sales velocity |
| Stripe | Revenue, MRR, churn |
| Production Postgres/MySQL | User behaviour, feature adoption |
| Zendesk or Intercom | Support volume, response times |
Do not sync everything at once. Each connector adds to your MAR count and your transformation backlog. Add sources as the business asks questions that require them.
Before you move on
Before setting up transformations (Step 3), verify:
- Sources are syncing successfully on schedule
- Raw tables are landing in your
rawschema with the expected columns - Sync alerts are configured (Fivetran emails you on connector failure)
- You understand the sync frequency — daily is usually sufficient for reporting; hourly for operational use cases
The raw tables will look messy. Timestamps as strings, boolean values as integers, deeply nested JSON columns. That is normal. The transformation layer (Step 3) is where you clean it up.