Meltano pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Meltano pricing has two paths. Meltano Open is the self-hosted, open-source version (MIT license): you run it on your own infrastructure and handle monitoring and uptime yourself. The managed offering has four plans, Starter, Growth, Scale and Enterprise, priced by compute capacity rather than by rows or connectors. Enterprise is custom.
Meltano publishes no prices for the managed plans. Its pricing page lists what each plan includes, mainly a monthly allowance of compute hours, but no dollar amounts. To compare Meltano's managed plans with a competitor's listed rates, you need a quote from Meltano first.
Meltano defines a compute hour as the time its managed infrastructure spends actively running your pipelines: extracting data from a source, loading it to a destination, or transforming it. Idle time between runs does not count.
Plan Comparison
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| Option | Compute hours / month | Workspaces | Included support and services |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meltano Open | Self-hosted | Self-hosted | Open source; you manage infrastructure, monitoring and uptime |
| Starter | 200 | 25 | Managed infrastructure, unlimited users, 600+ connectors, Reverse ETL, an AI data engineer agent, direct Slack access to Meltano engineers, enterprise security, SLA |
| Growth | 2,000 | 100 | Everything in Starter, plus 8 hours of engineering on demand per month, shared account management, and a cost-monitoring workspace as an add-on |
| Scale | 5,000 | Unlimited | Everything in Growth, plus 15 hours of engineering on demand per month, dedicated account management, and a cost-monitoring workspace included |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | Unlimited | Everything in Scale, plus custom connectors, custom engineering hours and a custom SLA |
The jump from Starter to Growth is large: ten times the compute hours, four times the workspaces, and the first included engineering hours. A team that outgrows Starter's 200 hours has no plan in between. Starter also already includes unlimited users, so team size does not push you up a plan; compute does.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
- Self-hosting is not free in practice. Meltano Open has no plan fee, but you pay for the servers it runs on and for the engineering time to keep it running. The pricing page itself says you manage your own infrastructure, monitoring and uptime.
- Destination costs are separate. Loading data into Snowflake, BigQuery or another warehouse adds that warehouse's own charges on top of Meltano.
- Compute overages. The pricing page does not say what happens when a managed plan runs past its compute-hour allowance. Ask before you sign.
- Custom connectors. Connectors you build with the Meltano SDK need Python development time, unless you are on Enterprise, which lists custom connectors.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
With no published prices, the useful estimate is in compute hours, which decide the plan you need.
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| Team | Example workload | Compute hours / month | Plan that fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo engineer | Self-hosted pipelines | Your own servers | Meltano Open |
| Small team (5) | 1 pipeline running 10 minutes every hour | 24 x 10 min x 30 days = 120 | Starter (200) |
| Mid-size team (20) | 4 pipelines running 10 minutes every hour | 4 x 120 = 480 | Growth (2,000) |
The arithmetic shows how fast Starter fills up: two hourly pipelines of 10 minutes each use 240 compute hours a month, already more than Starter's 200. Measure how long your syncs run before you pick a plan, then ask Meltano for the price of that plan.
How Meltano Pricing Compares
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| Tool | Pricing basis | Published entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Meltano | Compute hours | No published price |
| Airbyte | Open Source is self-hosted; Pro and Enterprise Flex are capacity-based on Data Workers | Pro and Enterprise Flex are quote-based |
| Stitch | Monthly row volume | Standard starts at $100 per month; Advanced $1,500 per month and Premium $3,000 per month, billed annually |
| Hevo Data | Destination-event volume | Starter from $299/month billed monthly or $265/month billed annually; 5M events/month; Limited connectors, up to 1M events/month; Professional from $849/month billed monthly or $750/month billed annually for 20M events/month |
Meltano's self-hosted software and a managed ingestion service carry different operating responsibilities. Get the managed Meltano quote and compare it with the required connector coverage, infrastructure, monitoring and support. Hevo Free covers limited connectors and up to 1M events/month. Starter starts at $299/month billed monthly or $265/month billed annually for 5M events/month. Hevo counts each destination insert, update or delete as an event; usage above the plan quota incurs extra On-Demand fees. Published entry rates do not establish the cost of an equivalent deployment.