Today is a big day for me and our team, as the SaaS edition of our product is now in Public Beta! Meltano Cloud has all the flexibility of Meltano, but none of the hassle of self-managed infra. (Sign up now to claim your 100 free credits!)
It's been quite a journey: 5 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667399), the GitLab data team realized that their UI-based workflows were years behind the software development workflows practiced by the rest of the org. So to boost their own efficiency and confidence (and follow other teams in dogfooding GitLab: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#dogfooding), they started building their own ideal data tool through the lens of an open source DevOps company.
I didn't look into Meltano until 2 years later, when I was feeling a bit burned out after 5 years at GitLab and was ready for a change. (A 1,400-people org on the verge of IPO is very different from the 10-person startup I'd joined!) What struck me was how familiar the ELT and BI workflows felt: clicking Save and crossing my fingers reminded me of FTPing into web servers, making live changes to PHP files, and checking in the browser if I hadn't broken anything. But that was 20 years ago, before I learned about version control, CI/CD, and isolated envs.
I always loved GitLab's mission of "everyone can contribute", but was skeptical of it ever finding traction outside of software orgs. But here was a field that looked to me like a type of software engineering, but was somehow decades behind. I reflected on how open source had allowed teenage-me to turn coding from a hobby into marketable skills and a "real" job before I had even finished high school, which would've been near impossible in the pay-to-play world of data.
So I joined the Meltano team, initially as eng lead until 6 months later, GitLab decided that Meltano wasn't growing enough to warrant 6 FTE. So instead, I was left by myself with one year to turn the project around, doing everything from programming and product, to support and marketing.
I refocused Meltano on "open source ELT", the project started taking off, and by the end of the year I raised a Seed round led by GV and spun Meltano out of GitLab. We followed that up one year ago with a Seed-2 led by Venrock to continue our growth and build a commercial offering around the open source product: the "open core" business model in a nutshell.
The problem was that Meltano can be learned by anyone comfortable with Git, CLIs, and YAML, but still requires users to deploy it onto their own self-managed infra. Building a local POC is easy, but taking it into production requires CI/CD, Airflow, K8s, secrets management, log collection, and monitoring. With Meltano Cloud, all of that goes away: you build the pipelines, we manage the infra.
There's a lot more I could say, but considering the character limit I'll let our website do the talking instead:
- https://meltano.com/cloud <-- Sign up here and claim your 100 free credits!
- https://meltano.com/pricing <-- Usage-based, volume-independent
- https://github.com/meltano/meltano
We'd love to hear what you think about Meltano (Cloud)! If you join the Beta, you get 100 free credits (200 hourly or 100 daily runs) and a 20% discount on the pricing at GA (June 27). The first 100 to sign up get 1,000 credits -- that's 83 days of hourly runs or 3 years of dailies!
The team and I will be checking in here throughout the day, so don't hesitate to ask questions! If we don't get to you, feel free to join 3,500+ Meltano fans on https://meltano.com/slack and we'll chat there!
