Choosing the most cost-effective data pipeline requires weighing DIY builds against automated ELT platforms. While DIY offers control, it demands months of engineering time, high maintenance, and poor scalability, with hidden costs from bugs, schema drift, and compute usage. Open-source options ease builds but lack automation, support, and reliability. An efficient pipeline must handle normalization, incremental syncs, idempotence, and schema changes automatically to ensure accuracy and reduce warehouse costs. Fivetran provides prebuilt connectors, self-healing pipelines, dbt-powered transformations, and APIs for automation, delivering 99.9% uptime and freeing engineers for higher-value work.

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