MAR is the billing unit behind Fivetran's usage-based pricing: a count of the distinct rows a connector actively synced in a given month.
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Quick answer: Monthly Active Rows (MAR) is Fivetran's billing metric: roughly, the number of distinct rows a connection actually synced (inserted, updated, or deleted) in a calendar month, not the total row count of your tables. Fivetran's free plan includes 500,000 MAR for connections, and a $5 base charge applies to standard connections beyond that, with "total monthly usage x spend rate" determining the rest. As of this writing, Fivetran doesn't publish the actual spend-rate table past the base charge, so a team can't calculate its own cost past the free tier from the pricing page alone.
Monthly Active Rows counts rows that were actively synced, inserted, updated, or deleted, through a connection in a given month, not the total size of the source table. A 50-million-row table where only 200,000 rows changed this month contributes roughly 200,000 MAR for that connection, not 50 million. That distinction is the whole point of the metric: it's meant to track the ongoing cost of keeping a pipeline current, not the one-time cost of a table's total size.
Fivetran, and several other usage-based ETL vendors, use a version of this row-counting model instead of flat per-connector or per-seat pricing. The appeal for a vendor is that it scales cost with actual usage; the tradeoff for a customer is that the bill moves with data volume, which is harder to predict in advance than a flat subscription.
Checked directly against Fivetran's pricing page: the Free Plan includes 500,000 MAR for connections (separately, 3,500 MAR for Activations and 5,000 monthly model runs for Transformations). Past the free tier, a $5 base charge applies to standard connections between 1 MAR and 1M MAR, and the page states the cost formula as "total monthly usage x spend rate," with the spend rate declining as usage grows. What the page does not publish is the actual spend-rate figure itself, the dollar amount per row above the base charge isn't listed, so estimating a real bill beyond the free tier and the $5 minimum requires either historical billing data or a quote from Fivetran directly.
Transformations are priced on a separate, fully published tier table: free up to 5,000 monthly model runs, $0.01 per run from 5,001 to 30,000, $0.007 per run from 30,001 to 100,000, and $0.002 per run above 100,000. Annual contracts can save up to 22% versus month-to-month.
A team that wants to know "what will this cost us in six months" needs to project both their MAR growth and a spend rate Fivetran doesn't publish. That's a normal feature of usage-based pricing generally, not unique to Fivetran, but it's worth naming plainly: the free tier and the $5 base charge are the only concrete numbers a prospective customer can plan against without a sales conversation.
QueryFlow doesn't measure or bill on rows synced at all. Pipelines is a flat $29.99/month or $199.99/year, whether a sync moves a thousand rows or ten million, and Studio is $9.99/month or $99/year for the SQL editor, AI Ask panel, and connections without Data Sync. The tradeoff runs the other way from Fivetran's: no bill that grows with data volume, but also no per-row cost signal telling a team which specific pipeline is expensive to run.
Related: the Fivetran alternative overview, and QueryFlow's full pricing for the flat-rate detail.
Just the ones that changed, based on Fivetran's own description: a count of rows actively inserted, updated, or deleted through a connection in a month, not the table's total row count.
Not on its public pricing page as of this writing. The page states the formula (usage times spend rate, with volume discounts) and the $5 base charge and free-tier limits, but not the spend-rate figure itself.
No. QueryFlow Pipelines is a flat $29.99/month or $199.99/year regardless of how many rows a sync moves.
No, each has its own unit and limits. Connections uses MAR, Activations has its own MAR-style limit, and Transformations bills on monthly model runs, not rows.
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