Replacing Fivetran: How Recharge Solved Replication Failures and Unified Its Data Stack

How Recharge cut Snowflake costs 32%, eliminated recurring pipeline failures, and unified its ETL and Reverse ETL stack with Matia

Sarah Lubeck

April 24, 2026

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min read

Company: Recharge
‍Location: Los Angeles, CA
Industry: Subscription Management / E-commerce SaaS
‍Solutions: Matia ETL, Matia Reverse ETL
‍Website:https://getrecharge.com/

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The Data Stack

Ingestion: Matia
Reverse ETL: Matia
Warehouse: Snowflake
Transformation: dbt Core
Cost Optimization: Select.dev
Connectors Used: PostgreSQL, Mysql, Salesforce, Snowflake, plus more than a dozen more

The Company

Recharge is the leading subscription management platform for e-commerce merchants, primarily those selling on Shopify. Recharge helps merchants convert one-time buyers into loyal subscribers and retain them over time through a suite of tools spanning subscription management, analytics, and AI-powered customer retention.

David Lexa is Senior Engineering Manager for the Data Engineering team at Recharge, overseeing a team responsible for data ingestion, transformation, and powering internal analytics, merchant-facing data products, and billing operations, all running through Snowflake.

Recurring Replication Failures

The more operationally disruptive issue was a recurring pattern of MySQL replica failures in Fivetran. When Google automatically recovered a replica, it would sometimes reconstitute without the necessary binary logs. Fivetran would then flag the pipeline as broken and require a full table reload to re-sync.

For Recharge's largest tables (some requiring up to 5 days to fully refresh), this was untenable. The team couldn't afford days of stale data. Their workaround was painful: get on a call with Fivetran support, manually set the binary log position to the time of failure, then push the missed records back through the pipeline by manually triggering updates on affected rows.

"We would get on a call with Fivetran, and we would need to work with them to set the bin log position to a certain time manually. They would need to do it. It's not something we could do ourselves." — David Lexa, Senior Engineering Manager, Data Engineering, Recharge

The combination of cost pressure and operational fragility made the case for switching clear.

Escalating Costs

Approximately nine months before Recharge's ingestion contract renewal, David's team received a preview of the upcoming pricing: a projected increase of 75–100%. The scale of the jump was significant enough to prompt a formal evaluation of alternatives.

Fragmented Tooling

Running ETL and reverse ETL across two separate platforms added operational overhead. Even as tools merged, they were missing functionality and integration that could be gained from a native, unified platform

The Solution

After evaluating alternatives, Recharge selected Matia to streamline both ETL and reverse ETL into a single platform. Key factors in the decision:

Binary Log Recovery Feature: Matia platform has a capability that allows Recharge to temporarily switch to the master MySQL endpoint for a single sync during a replica failure, then return to the replica, eliminating the manual Fivetran support calls that had been a recurring time drain
Cost Efficiency: Recharge's renewal quote came in at nearly 70% their existing rate. Migrating platforms also gave them the opportunity to audit which tables were used downstream in dbt, leading to a reduction in unnecessary syncs.
Roadmap Influence: Matia offered a more collaborative relationship, with the ability to request and receive specific features quickly
Unified Data Movement: One platform to replace both Fivetran (ETL) and Hightouch (reverse ETL), reducing context-switching and operational complexity

The Impact

Incident Response Time Reduced

The binary log recovery feature eliminated what had been a recurring, multi-hour incident response process. What previously required a coordinated call with Fivetran support and manual data backfilling now takes a single self-service action.

32% Reduction in Snowflake Costs

Following the migration, Recharge saw a 32% decrease in Snowflake compute costs. This was driven by Matia's more efficient sync behavior, as well as the opportunity the migration provided to audit and remove tables that weren't being actively used downstream in dbt.

“The migration forced us to ask: what data are we actually using? Cutting the noise, combined with Matia's efficiency, brought our Snowflake costs down around 32%."

ETL + Reverse ETL Consolidated; Lower Platform Costs

By replacing Fivetran and Hightouch with a single Matia platform, Recharge simplified its data movement stack. Reverse ETL syncs to Salesforce and HubSpot now run alongside ETL pipelines in one tool, reducing the operational burden on the data team.

Faster Innovation Through Collaboration

The Matia team has delivered custom capabilities, including the binary log endpoint switching feature and a solution for handling new Elasticsearch index versions, in response to Recharge's specific needs. Critically, having a reliable and unified data foundation in Snowflake is what makes Recharge's growing AI initiatives possible. Clean, trusted data flowing from production systems through Matia into Snowflake is the prerequisite for every LLM-powered feature the team builds on top of it.

Making AI Reliable Enough for Customer-Facing Products

Recharge already had access to AI capabilities. The challenge was delivering AI in ways that could reliably power merchant-facing experiences.

With a stable, unified data foundation in place, the team can now build and operate AI capabilities that directly impact customers without risking downtime, stale data, or broken pipelines.

Three use cases are already in production:

Merchant Vertical Classification Recharge uses Snowflake's built-in LLM capabilities to automatically classify merchants into verticals and subverticals based on their products and website data, replacing what would otherwise be manual tagging at scale.
Cancellation Reason Summarization The data team aggregates subscriber cancellation reasons and uses AI to surface synthesized insights to merchants, giving them a clear view of why subscribers are churning and where to focus retention efforts.
Text-to-SQL for Merchant Analytics(beta) Recharge is building a natural language interface on top of its merchant analytics product, letting merchants query their subscription data by asking plain-language questions rather than navigating pre-built dashboards.
Product Performance AI Report Recharge’s data team produces a monthly email that scores top 5 products based on revenue and provides insights about churn rate, benchmarks, user acquisition, and other relevant metrics for that specific product.

Looking Ahead

Recharge's data team is actively expanding its AI-powered product surface, with new use cases in development. As Recharge continues to build data products that power both internal operations and merchant-facing experiences, Matia's role as a reliable, responsive partner in the data stack will remain central to that work.

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