If other ELT tools haven’t worked out or you’re just tired of building pipelines, you’re in the right place. Fivetran offers a 14-day free trial so you can evaluate our connectors risk-free. Many of our customers — including Square, Lime, Duo Security, ClassPass, WeWork and Kickstarter — started out like this.

This article will quickly walk you through your free trial and show you how to get the most out of it. Need more? Check out our in-depth trial guide for small businesses and large enterprises.

Follow the steps below to start your free trial

1. Sign up.
2. Connect your data sources. We have a library of 300+ sources — and growing! — to choose from, and you can test any of them for free. Some of our most popular application sources are Salesforce, Hubspot, Facebook Ads, Stripe, Shopify and Google Analytics, but we support dozens across marketing, finance, product and operational analytics. Of course, your data stack wouldn’t be complete without hooking up your databases. Some of our most popular database connectors are SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL and MongoDB — but we support many more!
3. Connect your data warehouse. No warehouse? No worries. We'll automatically spin up a free Google BigQuery warehouse for you during the trial. If you’d like to own it yourself once the trial is over, we’ll hand you the keys.
4. Start your initial sync* … and voilà! When your first initial sync completes, your 14-day trial officially starts. Note that for some sources and data sets, a historical sync could take minutes; for larger data sets or applications with throttled APIs, this will take longer.
5. Transform your data in a few clicks. You can leverage Quickstart Data Models to achieve faster time-to-insight, more efficient workflows, and full end-to-end ELT in one tool⸺all powered by dbt Core™*. If you already have a dbt project, use our off-the-shelf data models.

Watch this video on our Quickstart Data Models to see how you can achieve centralized, model-ready data in a mater of minutes!

Tip: We recommend setting up all the connectors you’d like to try before starting your initial sync, so you can maximize your 14 free days.

In order to do this, you may need to add additional users to authorize Fivetran for some sources, or involve your security team. Here are some helpful, shareable resources to involve your teammates:

1. Send over the demo resource center so your teammates can see how easy connector setup truly is with Fivetran.
2. Share Fivetran’s Security whitepaper and robust security documentation with anyone who wants to learn how Fivetran will protect your and your customers’ data.

What should I look for when I’m evaluating Fivetran?

The biggest reason our customers, both big and small, choose Fivetran over building themselves or other ETL/ELT vendors is the level of automation, simplicity and reliability we deliver. 

Fivetran connectors are fully managed, deploy in minutes and normalize data from denormalized APIs — we create a thoughtful entity-relationship diagram (ERD) for every SaaS source.

So instead of handling every messy JSON blob like this one from Jira…

…you get normalized data that’s easy to query right away. For example, here's our ERD for software development tool Jira:

Fivetran connectors also automatically adapt to API and schema changes. Modern cloud-based applications are in a constant state of change, and each update — think new columns and tables — can interrupt a traditional ETL data pipeline. We automatically replicate any changes on your source side to your warehouse in a matter of minutes.

For example, last month Fivetran handled 438,294 total schema changes for our Salesforce connector alone. That’s 438,294 times that our customer’s avoided fixing pipelines because Fivetran handles this for them.

As you evaluate Fivetran and compare to homegrown pipelines or other tools which require significantly more maintenance and time to build, we recommend you consider the total cost of ownership of building and maintaining pipelines yourself.

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You’ve started your Fivetran trial. What’s next?

1. Check that the data has landed. The easiest way to do this is to log in to your destination and view your data. This is often the most exciting moment for our customers - to see that their data has landed in their warehouse with ease!
2. Add additional sources. You’ll want to evaluate all your use cases and get an accurate usage estimate for each source during your trial. After your historical sync is complete, we’ll continue to do incremental batch updates and track your monthly active row (MAR) usage.
3. Don’t forget to set-up transformations for new sources! You’ll increase reporting reliability, accelerate data analysis and save yourself time.
4. Create nearly instant reports and analyses in your BI tool. Blend data from different tools so you can fully experience the power of a modern data stack, then share these with your stakeholders. Check out these tips & tricks to start integrating your data for our most popular connectors.
5. Add our free Platform Connector, which records Fivetran events, including sync statistics, user activities and more in your destination, so you can monitor performance and control costs.‍
6. View your usage and billing estimates. Seven days into your trial, you’ll get a pricing estimate based on your usage. Once it’s ready, you can view your usage and billing estimates within your dashboard.

Watch this quick demo to learn how to understand and optimize your trial usage estimate.

You’ve reached the end of your 14-day trial, woo-hoo! 

So you love not building or fixing pipelines and you’re ready to tie the knot with Fivetran — fabulous. If your usage estimate is below 500,000 MAR, I have great news: You are eligible for Fivetran’s Free Plan. All you have to do is select Free Plan on your billing page to continue using Fivetran for free.

If your usage estimate is above 500,000 MAR, you can purchase online with a credit card and pay monthly at list price for maximum flexibility. Or you can chat with sales@fivetran.com to purchase an annual contract, which gives you 5 percent savings.

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How can we help?

If you have questions at any point during your trial, you can contact us in a few different ways:

1. Check out our support portal or consult our documentation for technical questions.
2. Email sales directly at sales@fivetran.com.

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*dbt Core is a trademark of dbt Labs, Inc. All rights therein are reserved to dbt Labs, Inc. Fivetran Transformations is not a product or service of or endorsed by dbt Labs, Inc.