Zero Migration Downtime, No Double-Paying: How Kiva Replaced Its Legacy ETL Provider and Reduced Cost by 25%

Kiva replaced its legacy ETL provider after 10 years with them, completing a migration with zero business-critical downtime and a custom Snowplow connector no other vendor could deliver.

Company: Kiva   Location: San Francisco, CA

Industry: Nonprofit, Microfinance

Solutions: Matia ETL

Website: kiva.org

The Data Stack

• ETL: Matia
• Transformation: dbt
• Connectors used: Google Sheets, MySQL, DynamoDB, Salesforce, Iterable, Snowplow, mobile (iOS) events

The Company

Kiva is a nonprofit that connects individual lenders directly to borrowers around the world, expanding financial access for underserved communities through crowdfunded microloans.

Greg Wilson has led Kiva's data function for 5.5 years, running data as a one-person team. Every tool decision has to hold up against a nonprofit's budget constraints and a lean, generalist workload. There's no room for surprises.

I didn't feel like I was giving up quality or reliability to find a price that worked for my organization with Matia. Our costs are 20-25% lower this year compared to our legacy provider. — Greg Wilson, Staff Data Engineer, Kiva

The Challenge

Kiva had spent over ten years with its previous ETL provider and faced numerous challenges:

• Repeated pricing model changes. The provider restructured pricing multiple times, and each renewal brought a significant increase despite Kiva's usage staying flat.
• Budget instability. For a nonprofit working with variable grant and donor funding, unpredictable renewal costs made planning difficult year over year.
• A connector gap. Kiva needed a reliable, direct integration with Snowplow, its web event collector. Most alternatives either didn't support it or pushed Kiva toward workarounds.
• Years without a credible alternative. Kiva had been evaluating replacements for years. Matia was the first viable second option they found, a sign of how rare a real alternative to the legacy providers actually is.

We'd been looking for alternatives for years. This was the first year we had two candidates who might actually be able to replace our provider. — Greg Wilson, Staff Data Engineer, Kiva

Kiva ran parallel trials with Matia and another third-party streaming data platform to find a replacement. While the other third-party technology impressed Greg, it wasn't built for Kiva's use case:

• No direct Snowplow support. The suggested fix was a webhook workaround stitched together with its own transformation tools, workable in theory, roundabout in practice.
• No help figuring out the workaround. They didn't provide support for building the webhook path it had recommended.
• Little pricing transparency. They offered no meaningful engagement on price, and once Kiva ran the numbers against its actual usage, the pricing wasn't as competitive as hoped.

Three things ultimately ruled the other third-party out: price, product fit, and no real solution for Snowplow.

It was price, product fit, and they just didn't have a solution for Snowplow. They didn't provide support for figuring out the workaround they'd suggested. — Greg Wilson, Kiva

The Solution

Matia won the migration on three fronts: predictable pricing with no surprises at renewal, a team willing to build what Kiva needed, and a product on par for a 1:1 swap to make the migration from its legacy provider of 10 years simple with no downtime.

• Pricing built for predictability. Matia put clear limits on how much prices could rise at renewal. Kiva knows what to expect going in, with no renewal-cycle surprises.
• A custom Snowplow connector. Snowplow needed a collector endpoint, standardized enrichment, and custom event shredding across multiple tables. Matia agreed to build it before the trial even started, then delivered through daily feedback cycles in a shared Slack channel: flagging issues, testing fixes, and iterating until it worked.
• Backwards compatible with their legacy schemas. Matia mapped to Kiva's existing setup so the migration didn't require redesigning workflows around a new product.
• Migration with no business-critical downtime. Google Sheets, MySQL, DynamoDB, Salesforce, and Iterable moved over with minimal friction, timed to close out before Kiva's legacy contract expired. No double-paying, no overlap.

It was a night and day difference between the level of engagement and support we got between the two products. — Greg Wilson, Kiva

Plans are great, but they fall apart when the rubber meets the road. Having that trust in Matia was instrumental in us making that decision. — Greg Wilson, Staff Data Engineer, Kiva

The Impact

• Migration completed quickly, on schedule, with no business-critical downtime (and no double-paying). The connector migration moved quickly while engineering effort focused on the harder Snowplow integration.
• Pricing risk removed from the budgeting equation. Kiva now has contractual limits on renewal increases, a meaningful change for a nonprofit managing constrained resources.
• A business-critical connector that didn't exist before now does. The custom Snowplow integration gives Kiva direct, standardized event data instead of a workaround.
• Built for whatever comes next. Large legacy vendors slow down as they scale. Kiva now has a partner it trusts to build novel connectors on demand, not just maintain the ones it already has.

Matia is a solid product. It's really good, but the team is what sets it apart: the level of support you get. — Greg Wilson, Staff Data Engineer, Kiva

Looking Ahead

Kiva plans to dig into Matia's catalog and lineage capabilities in the coming month for more visibility into how data moves across its stack, valuable for a team of one with no backup for tribal knowledge.

As companies get really big, they often slow down. They're not as nimble. Matia is so nimble. I'm confident that if something novel comes up in the next three to five years, Matia is a great partner for adapting to it. — Greg Wilson, Kiva