Why Flat Pricing Beats Per-Row Billing

If you've ever been surprised by a Fivetran bill, you already understand the problem with per-row pricing.

The model sounds reasonable in theory. You pay for what you use. Small pipelines pay less. Heavy users pay more. But in practice, per-row pricing has a way of turning data integration from an infrastructure cost into an unpredictable liability — one that grows fastest exactly when your business is growing.

We built Landed with a different model: flat monthly pricing with simple tiers. Here's why we made that choice, and why we think it matters.

The Problem With Per-Row Pricing

Fivetran's pricing is based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR) — roughly, the number of rows synced or updated in a given month. At first glance, it seems like a sensible metric. You're paying for the data you move.

But MAR has some properties that make it a poor fit for how data pipelines actually work.

Usage spikes are unpredictable. A new marketing campaign, a product launch, a one-time backfill — any of these can send your row count through the roof in a single month. You didn't choose to use more of the product. You just had a good month. And Fivetran charges you for it.

Historical syncs are punishing. When you add a new connector, you typically need to sync historical data to backfill your destination. That backfill might involve hundreds of millions of rows — a one-time cost that Fivetran bills as if it were ongoing usage. Teams routinely receive 5-10x their normal bill in the month they onboard a new source.

The incentive is backwards. Per-row pricing creates a subtle pressure to sync less data, less frequently. Maybe you avoid backfilling that historical table. Maybe you increase your sync interval to reduce churn. Maybe you skip adding a new field to keep the updated-row count down. You're managing your bill instead of managing your data.

Growth is penalized. The whole point of data integration is to help your business grow. But with per-row pricing, growth in your underlying business — more customers, more transactions, more events — directly translates to higher data infrastructure costs. Your bill goes up because you're doing well. That's a strange incentive structure.

What Flat Pricing Changes

Landed offers three simple plans: Free ($0), Pro ($99/mo), and Business ($499/mo). Each plan includes a set number of connectors, and you can sync as many rows as those connectors produce. No per-row charges. No usage metering. No surprises.

Budgeting becomes straightforward. You know exactly what you'll pay every month. There's no spreadsheet, no MAR calculator, no anxious refreshing of the billing dashboard after a big campaign.

Backfills cost nothing extra. Onboarding a new source means syncing its history. With flat pricing, that's included. There's no perverse incentive to skip historical data or to delay adding new connectors because of the onboarding spike.

You can actually use your data. With predictable costs, you're free to sync more frequently, add more fields, enable more sources. The product works better when you don't have to second-guess every integration decision.

We're aligned with you. When you sync more data, your business is growing. We want that. Our pricing doesn't punish you for it. In fact, we want you to extract as much value as possible from the data you're already paying to produce — because that makes Landed more valuable to you, not less.

The Fivetran Comparison

Fivetran's pricing starts at roughly $0.50 per thousand MAR after a free tier. That sounds cheap until you're syncing 50 million rows a month across a handful of sources — which is not unusual for a mid-sized SaaS company. At that scale, you're looking at $25,000/month or more, before volume discounts.

Landed's Pro plan is $99/month. Business is $499/month. Whether your connectors produce 10 million rows or 10 billion rows, the price is the same.

We're not pretending that flat pricing is cheaper at every scale for every team. If you're syncing a tiny amount of data from one source, per-row might cost you less. But for any team with real data volumes and real growth, flat pricing typically comes in substantially lower — and the predictability alone is worth something.

A Note on What We're Not Doing

Flat pricing is only viable if the connectors actually work reliably. If you're paying a flat rate, you're trusting that the sync will run cleanly and completely every time. That's why Landed invests heavily in connector reliability: automated diagnostics, automated schema evolution, continuous validation against the live API.

We're not subsidizing cheap pricing by cutting corners on reliability. The two go together. Flat pricing only makes sense if we're confident the connectors deliver full value every month — which means making them as close to maintenance-free as possible.

The Bigger Picture

Pricing is a signal. How a company charges you says something about what they're optimizing for.

Per-row pricing optimizes for revenue as data volumes grow. The vendor benefits when your data grows, which sounds aligned — until you realize that the benefit is asymmetric. You pay more; they make more; but the cost of delivering the service doesn't grow proportionally with row count. The margin expands at your expense.

Flat pricing optimizes for adoption and reliability. We make more money when you add more connectors, which means we're incentivized to make each connector so reliable and valuable that you want to add more of them. That's the alignment we're going for.

We think data infrastructure should be a predictable line item, not a variable cost that fluctuates with your business. And we think the company selling it to you should want you to use it as much as possible — not the minimum you can get away with.

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Landed is free to try for 14 days, with no credit card required. See the pricing page for the full breakdown, or start a free trial to connect your first source.