Data Pipelines from SaaS Application Providers
SaaS application vendors like Stripe and Salesforce have started offering native data pipelines to sync business data directly to customer data warehouses. While this creates a new revenue stream and increases user stickiness, most mid-size application providers will not follow the same path due to the complexity and cost of maintaining reliable data pipelines.
Why Are SaaS Vendors Building Data Pipelines?
ELT providers like Fivetran, Airbyte, and DataStori sync data between business applications and data warehouses. Each provider varies along the dimensions of pricing, security, number of connectors, and ecosystem support. However, if SaaS applications start providing data pipelines themselves, these dimensions become less relevant. For the app vendor, native pipelines create a new revenue stream and increase customer lock-in.
Notable Examples
- Stripe Data Pipeline — Syncs Stripe data directly to Snowflake and Redshift
- Salesforce Data Pipelines — Native data export from Salesforce to external warehouses
Why Won't Most SaaS Providers Offer Data Pipelines?
- Data pipelines are brittle and expensive to maintain. Retries, failures, historical loads, data quality, and schema checks increase support costs and distract from the core product.
- ELT is not their core business. For mid-scale applications, the engineering investment is not justified when they should focus on their primary product.
- Incomplete offering without other connectors. If a customer wants to join Stripe and NetSuite data, Stripe pipelines alone are insufficient without NetSuite data also being available.
- Varied customer infrastructure. Customers use AWS, Azure, or GCP and expect output in various formats (CSV, Parquet, Delta) to different destinations (Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, Fabric Lakehouse).
- Added technical debt. Adding ETL to the product suite slows core product releases and complicates breaking changes.
What Does the Future Look Like?
Large vendors with massive customer bases and resources — like Stripe and Salesforce — may continue down this path, especially when data can flow back into their own analytics ecosystem (Salesforce + Tableau, Google Analytics + BigQuery + Looker). However, for most mid-size and smaller SaaS applications, providing reliable ELT services remains a formidable challenge best left to dedicated data integration platforms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use a SaaS vendor's native data pipeline or a third-party ELT tool?
If you only need data from a single application (e.g., Stripe alone), the vendor's native pipeline may be simpler. But if you need to join data from multiple sources (e.g., Stripe + NetSuite + HubSpot), a third-party ELT tool like DataStori provides a unified pipeline across all your applications.
Will ELT tools become obsolete if all SaaS vendors offer data pipelines?
Unlikely. Most organizations use 5-15 SaaS applications, and businesses need a single platform to ingest, deduplicate, and quality-check data from all of them. Even if a few large vendors offer native pipelines, the need for a unified data integration layer persists.