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Airbyte pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Airbyte (airbyte.com) is a data pipeline tool. Usage-based credits: 4 per GB moved from databases and files and 6 per million rows from APIs; Standard is $20/mo with 5 credits then $5 each, while Pro and Enterprise Flex are quote-only.. No free plan.

What Airbyte costs

  • ELT, 5M rows: $120/mo (Standard pay-as-you-go: PostgreSQL 2.5 GB x 4 credits = 10; four API sources 2.5M rows x 6 credits per million = 15; total 25 credits. Standard is $20 with 5 credits included, then 20 x $5 = $100, so $120. Plus costs $189 for its 40-credit minimum, so Standard is cheaper. Assumes none of the five sources is an add-on Enterprise Connector and that the 3 users carry no seat fee (none published). Self-hosted Airbyte Core is not counted.)
  • CDP, 10k users: $20/mo (Only the reverse-ETL route applies, because Airbyte does not collect product events. Data activation reads the warehouse, which should bill as a database source at 4 credits per GB (inferred; the activation page gives no billing text). At about 1 KB per record, 60,000 changed records (600,000 on full re-syncs) come to at most 2.4 credits, inside the 5 included, so the $20 Standard minimum. This holds up to about 2 KB per record on full re-syncs.)
  • Models, 3 users: not offered (n/a: Airbyte does not develop or schedule SQL models itself. Its dbt integration runs dbt transformations after each sync, and the docs say a paid dbt Cloud subscription is required, so that separate bill is the one that would apply.)

Plan compared: Standard, pay-as-you-go, 25 credits a month. Every price is for the same small company on the cheapest self-serve plan that fully covers the job, billed monthly: loading 5 million rows a month from Postgres and 4 SaaS apps into a warehouse (headline), getting data on 10,000 users into a warehouse and 2 business tools, or running 100 daily SQL models for a 3-person team. Free plans count when they cover the whole job; warehouse compute and free self-hosted open-source editions are not counted.

Airbyte price hikes

Alternatives to Airbyte

Airbyte is the cheapest data pipeline tool we track at 5 million rows a month from 5 sources. The others:

Airbyte alternatives: 2 data pipeline tools compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Oct 2026 · Limits cut: The free trial was cut from 30 days to 14 days; the 400 trial credits (worth $2,000 of usage) did not change.
  • Sep 2026 · Price increase: Standard rose from $10/mo to $20/mo (+100%) and now includes 5 credits, then $5 per extra credit; a new Plus plan at $189/mo for 40 credits was added alongside.

Sources

Pricing page: airbyte.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices and credit rates come from airbyte.com/pricing and Airbyte's manage-credits billing docs (checked 2026-10-17). The Sep 2026 Standard hike rests only on PricingSaaS captures because the web-search budget ran out, so no Airbyte announcement was checked and the $10 unit is inferred as monthly.