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Quick guide: Get maximum value from your Fivetran free trial

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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 guide will quickly walk you through your free trial and show you how to get the most out of it. Looking for something even shorter and sweeter? Check out our trial checklist.

Follow the steps below to start your free trial

  1. Sign up.
  2. Connect your data sources. We have a library of 200+ 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 wa-lah! 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.

*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. 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.

To accelerate your analytics, we offer in-warehouse transformations for dbt Core and prebuilt data models for many popular sources. You can use Fivetran Transformations to automate, orchestrate and simplify your data workflows right from the Fivetran dashboard.

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. 
  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. Set up transformations using our integration with dbt Core and Fivetran Data Models, so you can increase reporting reliability and accelerate data analysis. This is completely free and enables end-to-end ELT within a single tool. Learn more or set up your first transformation.
  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. Check out these tips & tricks to start integrating your data for our most popular connectors.
  5. Add our free log connector, which records Fivetran events, including sync statistics, user activities and more in your destination.
  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.

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 — great! 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 greater savings and access to your very own customer success manager. Learn more about our pricing here.

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. Have a live chat with us. We’ll route you to the correct department based on the nature of your question.
  3. Email sales directly at sales@fivetran.com.

Not ready for a trial? We'd be happy to walk you through a personalized demo.