ELT Cost Reduction for a Subscription Apparel Brand

The situation

A subscription apparel company was paying for Fivetran to move Shopify and GA4 data into their warehouse. The pipelines worked, but Fivetran’s Monthly Active Row pricing meant the bill grew with every transaction. For a subscription business generating continuous Shopify events and GA4 session data, that volume added up fast.

The cost wasn’t triggered by misuse or poor configuration. It was simply how Fivetran prices high-frequency e-commerce data. The company needed the same data, at the same freshness, for less money.

What we built

CorrDyn evaluated Estuary as a replacement for the Shopify and GA4 connectors. Estuary’s pricing structure is based on data volume rather than row count, which changes the math significantly for sources that generate many small events.

We ran both systems in parallel before cutting over, comparing row counts and schema outputs to confirm the Estuary connectors produced equivalent data. Downstream dbt models were tested against the new source tables before Fivetran was decommissioned. The data engineering work also included documenting the migration as a retrospective so the team had a record of what changed and why.

What changed

The Shopify and GA4 pipelines now run on Estuary at 80% lower cost than the equivalent Fivetran setup. The data arriving in the warehouse is the same. No downstream dashboards or models required changes after cutover. The cost optimization freed budget that the team redirected toward analytics development rather than infrastructure spend.