SaaS & business softwareAnalysis
Per-minute sync costs 2.8× a daily one: how four data-integration tools bill
Skyvia, Hevo, Fivetran and Airbyte pricing pages read for meter, free tier, freshness premium and India region, with Indian GST and data rules, as of September 2026.
Our December 2024 post on data integration was a Skyvia brochure: five features, a Salesforce-to-QuickBooks example and two customer stories written with the vendor, including Vedantu’s claim that about a fifth of its workforce used the tool. The question underneath it was a fair one, and Indian finance and operations teams still ask it: how do I keep the CRM, the accounting system and a reporting database in step without hiring a data engineer, and what will that cost each month? The honest answer depends less on the connector list, which every tool now has, than on three things the brochure skipped: what the tool counts, how often it syncs, and where it processes the data.
01Four tools, four meters, four free tiers
We read the pricing pages of four tools a mid-sized Indian company is likely to shortlist for moving data between business applications and a database or warehouse. Skyvia counts records processed, and its free plan allows 10,000 a month with a once-a-day schedule and two scheduled integrations that expire after 30 days.1 Hevo counts events and gives a million a month free to up to five users, with hourly scheduling and a limited connector set.2 Fivetran counts monthly active rows (MAR): rows inserted, updated or deleted in the month. Its free plan covers 500,000, and it adds a US$5 base charge to every paid connection that moves between one row and a million.3 Airbyte Cloud counts credits, which its page equates to roughly a gigabyte per five credits, and has no free plan: a 14-day trial with 400 credits, then US$20 a month for five.4
Free tiers run from nothing to a million units a month, and no two count the same thing
Free monthly allowance, thousands of each tool's own unit, on pricing pages read for September 2026
Source: Skyvia, Hevo, Fivetran and Airbyte pricing pages (undated) · as of 30 September 2026 · units differ: records, events, active rows, credits
The meter matters more than the headline number. Fivetran’s page excludes unchanged rows during re-syncs and the initial sync from MAR, so loading five years of invoices once costs nothing on its meter; you pay for what changes afterwards.3 Skyvia’s page counts records and does not say how a first full load is treated, so ask before you schedule one. Events and credits behave differently again.
This is also why the two customer stories in our 2024 post told a buyer so little. Vedantu’s story gave a share of staff using the tool and a quote about saving cost; Zammad’s gave a list of automated HR-to-helpdesk steps. Neither gave a row count, a sync frequency or a monthly bill, which are the three numbers that would let another company judge whether the same setup fits its budget. A reference call is worth asking for; ask the reference for those three numbers.
02How fresh does it need to be? That decides the bill
Skyvia is the one page of the four that prints a full grid: three paid plans that differ mainly in sync frequency, each sold in record bands from 5 million to 200 million a month. At the 10 million band, Basic syncs once a day for US$180 a month, Standard once an hour for US$299, and Professional once a minute for US$499. Paid annually, the same three cost US$149, US$239 and US$399 a month.1
The same 10 million records cost 1.7 times as much synced hourly, and 2.8 times as much every minute
Skyvia Data Integration list price at 10 million records a month, US$ a month, by sync frequency
- Billed monthly
- Billed annually
US$
Table view
| Billed monthly | Billed annually | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily (Basic) | 180 | 149 |
| Hourly (Standard) | 299 | 239 |
| Every minute (Professional) | 499 | 399 |
Source: Skyvia pricing page (undated), plan tiers as published in the page's structured data · as of 30 September 2026
The other three price freshness less visibly. Hevo’s free plan is fixed at hourly scheduling and its paid plans start at US$299 a month on monthly billing, US$265 on annual.2 Fivetran and Airbyte meter volume rather than frequency, so on those two the question to ask is which plan unlocks the schedule you need, and whether a busier schedule moves more rows or credits through the meter.
Most of the flows the 2024 post described do not need minute-level data. A Salesforce-to-accounting sync for month-end reconciliation is a daily job. A marketing dashboard read at the Monday meeting is a daily job. Inventory shown on a storefront is the exception, because a stale count sells stock you no longer have. Split the flows by the freshness each genuinely needs and buy the expensive frequency only for the flows that earn it.
03Per connection, the rate falls with volume
Fivetran does not print a rate card. It prints a worked example for a company of 1 to 200 employees on its Standard plan: four connections moving 9,92,286 monthly active rows between them for US$511.15 a month. Divide each line by its rows and the pattern is plain. The busiest connection, Marketo at 8,47,574 rows, costs US$424.54, or about 50 cents per thousand rows. Google Analytics 4, at 21,993 rows, costs US$15.88, about 72 cents per thousand.3 The page confirms the mechanism in words: each connection’s spend rate declines as its usage rises.
In Fivetran's own example, the rate falls as volume rises: the smallest connection pays 44% more per row than the largest
Monthly active rows (thousands) against US$ per 1,000 rows, four connections in Fivetran's Standard-plan worked example
Table view
| Monthly active rows | US$ per 1,000 rows | |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | 22 | 0.72 |
| Facebook Ads | 34.5 | 0.64 |
| Google Ads | 88.2 | 0.55 |
| Marketo | 848 | 0.5 |
Source: Fivetran pricing page (undated), worked example for a 1 to 200 employee company; TechBag division · as of 30 September 2026 · four points from one worked example, not a published rate curve; they do not predict another connection's rate
Two practical consequences follow. A company with many small connections, a dozen SaaS tools each sending a few thousand rows, pays the highest per-row rate on every one of them, plus the US$5 base charge on each. And an annual commitment changes the arithmetic: the page offers discounts from 5% to 22% depending on plan and annual list price.3 The cheapest integration estate is a short one: fewer, busier connections, and the low-value ones synced less often or not at all.
Sources
- Skyvia, Data Integration pricing (plan tiers, records, sync frequency, overage) — vendor pricing page, undated
- Hevo Data, pricing (Free, Starter, Professional, Business Critical) — vendor pricing page, undated
- Fivetran, pricing (MAR, free plan, US$5 base charge, Standard-plan worked example, annual discounts) — vendor pricing page, undated
- Airbyte, pricing (Standard, Plus, Pro, Enterprise Flex; credits; 14-day trial) — vendor pricing page, undated
- Hevo Data documentation, Regions (six AWS regions including Mumbai) — vendor documentation, undated
- Fivetran documentation, Can I select a specific region to process my data? and IP addresses (India: ap-south-1 and asia-south1, Mumbai) — vendor documentation, undated
- Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (section 16, transfer outside India) — 11 August 2023
- DPDP Rules 2025, commencement timeline — notified 13 November 2025
- CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act (six-hour reporting, 180-day logs) — 28 April 2022
- RBI, Storage of Payment System Data (RBI/2017-18/153) — 6 April 2018
Related on TechBag: the databases and data tools guide covers the systems these pipelines feed; the HubSpot Data Hub page covers the CRM-native alternative to a separate sync tool.
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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