How does Fivetran's proprietary connector model work, and what are the pros and cons?

What Fivetran's doing is they're listening to their customers, and they're hearing what connectors need to be improved, what connectors need to be built for the first time, and that's how they prioritize their catalog of connectors. 

When a critical mass of customers expresses interest in a certain connector, probably with a weight towards the bigger customers, they decide to build that connector. They release it to a select number for a private preview, and ultimately, they'll move that connector to GA for everyone to enroll and start using. 

When the connector graduates into GA, I think what they're basically doing is monitoring that connector for breakage around the clock and if something breaks, rushing to get a fix out as soon as possible.

At the same time, they're probably trying to cultivate a relationship with that vendor, hoping that they can get some higher API rate limits or at least a heads up when the API's about to change or when some new feature is being added so they can adapt to those changes quickly.

The merits of this approach are proven by their success: they have a limited amount of connectors that companies can really trust and rely on. The marketing or data teams that use them put a lot of trust in those connectors, and Fivetran is able to command a premium for them because their customers feel like they’re the most reliable and accurate connectors that exist on the market.

The challenge is that it’s really expensive to maintain those connectors to the level of quality that Fivetran does, and so they can charge more, but I'm sure it also costs them a lot more to keep building and maintaining this long list of connectors around the clock all hours of the day.