The Data Leaders Digest – Fourth Edition

The best insights come from real conversations, with real leaders making tough calls, solving messy problems, and figuring out how to scale their data teams in the real world. That’s why I started The Data Leaders Digest.

Each month, we share what’s actually happening inside data teams, pulled from our podcasts, live events, meetups, and honest behind-the-scenes conversations.

No theory. Just practical takeaways you can use right now to make better decisions, avoid common pitfalls, and keep moving forward.

This Month’s Focus

If last month’s edition focused on how to respond to ETL cost pressure, this month is about taking back control before your team burns out, your budgets spiral, or your renewal locks you in.

In this edition, we unpack the community response to Fivetran’s pricing model, share lessons from May’s London Analytics Engineering Meetup, and recap two standout podcast episodes featuring Nik Walker from Co-op and Oleg Agapov from Hiive

You’ll also find three new guides to help you rethink how you pay for ETL, design better staging environments, and avoid failed SQL Server migrations.

Market Insights

Fivetran’s Pricing Shake-Up – The Fall Out Continues

Three months after Fivetran’s new pricing model went live, the data community is voicing strong concerns. Here’s what’s resonating most:

• Cost Surges: Many teams, especially those using multiple connectors, report cost increases of 50–80%. The shift from account-wide to per-connector pricing has hit larger and more complex data environments hardest.

• Budgeting Headaches: Data engineers on Reddit and LinkedIn highlight that Fivetran’s pricing estimator tools often underpredict real-world costs, making budgeting and forecasting challenging.

• Trust Erosion: There’s a growing sense among data leaders that Fivetran’s changes have undermined trust and predictability—qualities that once set them apart.

• Exploring Alternatives: The community is actively discussing and trialling alternative platforms (Airbyte, Estuary, Hevo, Keboola) that offer more transparent and performance-based pricing.

These changes highlight a broader shift in the market towards cost transparency and predictable pricing in data integration.

Lessons from the Frontline

London Analytics Engineering Meetup at incident.io 

Another brilliant night with the London data community, this time hosted by Jack Colsey at incident.io and expertly organised by the team at Cognify Search.

A standout talk from Manou Campbell and Elena Burykh at Medik8, sharing how they’ve levelled up orchestration and reclaimed their team’s time. Instead of wrestling with manual tasks every month, they’ve rolled out Orchestra, a lightweight orchestration layer that lets them automate repetitive workflows, align syncs, and focus on higher-value work.

It resonated, especially when they shared how much energy gets wasted just managing ETL tools and manual processes. With 4-5 vendors syncing data from over 100 sources, their team is spending. Their solution? Design around flexibility, not vendor lock-in.

Also on stage: Sarah Levy, CEO of Euno, flying in from Tel Aviv to spark a thoughtful conversation around one of the great tensions in analytics engineering, build in Tableau or build in dbt? Her take: it’s not just a tooling decision, it’s a trust decision. Quick wins vs. structured reusability. Speed vs. rigour. It hit home for a lot of teams in the room.

If you’re not already attending these sessions, trust me, it’s worth getting involved.

🔗 Join the London Analytics Engineering Meetup

LinkedIn Live Recap: How Do Your Data Costs Stack Up?

This was our 4th event, and I’m delighted to say it was also our most attended yet, with 173 data leaders signed up. The community is growing, which confirms what I’ve believed from the start: there’s a gap in the market for real conversations and honest takes from people doing the work.

Key Takeaways

We brought together voices from across the modern data stack to answer: Where is your data budget really going, and how can you cut waste without breaking workflows?

Key moments:

• David Jayatilake (Cube) explained how BI tools are inflating cloud bills with inefficient queries—and what to do about it

• Ian Whitestone (Select.dev) broke down warehouse blind spots that silently burn through spend

• Aaron Phethean (Matatika) revealed how vendors use row-based pricing to trap you in renewal cycles, and how compatibility mode can break the loop

📺 Missed the event? Watch the full replay here

📖 Read the recap article

Data Matas Podcast: Season 2 New Episodes

Episode 4: Reducing Burnout and Rebuilding Trust

Nik Walker (Head of Data Engineering at Co-op) joins Data Matas to talk about redesigning delivery so engineers can focus on what matters, without burning out. It’s about psychological safety, impact-based prioritization, and making real-time data the exception, not the rule.

🎧 Listen if you want to learn:

• How Co-op cut cloud costs by syncing data at the right time, not all the time

• Why “pointless work” is the real cause of burnout in data teams

• How to build trust in data before scaling AI

• What a human-first, impact-focused engineering culture looks like

👉 Watch on YouTube | Listen on Transistor

📖 Read the recap article

Episode 5: Systems Thinking and Scalable Platforms

Oleg Agapov (Senior Analytics Engineer at Hiive) breaks down how data engineers evolve from tool mastery to systems design, and why that shift is essential for building platforms that scale.

🎧 Listen if you want to learn:

• Why most analytics engineers hit a ceiling and how to move past it

• How to align sync schedules with real business decisions

• What mentoring with clarity looks like in fast-moving teams

• The mindset shift from building dashboards to architecting systems

👉 Watch on YouTube | Listen on Transistor

📖 Read the recap article

New Resources to Help You Plan Your ETL Escape

We’ve just published three new guides exploring different aspects of ETL strategy and migration planning:

1. Column vs Row: Why It’s Time to Rethink How You Pay for ETL

An exploration of different pricing models in ETL and their impact on data teams.

👉 Read the full article

2. Building Data Trust Through Effective ETL Staging Environments

How to validate transformations and separate environments cleanly before production deployment.

👉 Read the full article

3. Why Most SQL Server Data Tools Migrations Fail (And How to Build Better Ones)

Common pitfalls in SSIS and SSDT migrations and planning approaches that work better.

👉 Read the full article

What’s coming next month?

📅 12th June: Data Matas Podcast We sit down with John Napoleon-Kuofie, Data Analytics Manager at Monzo Bank, to explore how fast-paced teams deliver value in a regulated environment.

📅 26th June: LinkedIn Live  In our next event we will discuss the ROI of World-Class Engineers — We’ll share more details soon.

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