Introducing Certified & Community Connectors

When we launched Airbyte to the public in October 2020, we only had 5 connectors. They didn’t have any quality labels, but they were definitely in an alpha state. In 2021, we grew the number of connectors to 200, and introduced some quality labels to those connectors to set the right expectation for our community. It’s always been an important value for us to be transparent with our community.

And now with over 350 official connectors, we have some news to share about the classification system of our connectors. 

New Connector Classifications: Certified & Community 

On September 18th 2023, we will deprecate the Alpha / Beta / Generally Available classifications we’ve been using for connectors. Moving forward, all Airbyte connectors will either be classified as Certified or Community. 

A Certified connector is actively maintained and supported by Airbyte. 

A Community connector is maintained by the Airbyte community until it becomes Certified. Airbyte has over 800 code contributors and 15,000 people in our Slack to help. The Airbyte team is continually certifying Community connectors as usage grows. 

Why we are moving away from Alpha / Beta / GA

For the past year, we have been referring to our connectors using the classifications Alpha / Beta / GA. Those labels described both the quality of a connector, as well as the level of support Airbyte provides for it. This made sense when Airbyte was an early stage product with lots of new and quickly improving connectors. However, for a while now, the average overall sync success rate of all our connectors is over 99%. This means that Airbyte works reliably for the overwhelming majority of users. This is a major accomplishment for our project, especially given our catalog is the biggest in the industry and we now offer >350 official connectors. Not only that, but as a result of the recent release of our No-Code Connector Builder, our users have built and are running >1,000 active custom connections. Our low-code and no-code frameworks are designed to make the construction and ongoing maintenance of our connectors much easier and faster.   

Overall avg success rate of all Airbyte connectors (Certified + Community)

Support options by connector classification 

Now that we have reached a level of stable reliability across the board, we will move to a simpler classification system that distinguishes connectors based on who maintains and provides support for the connectors.   

As always, we offer Premium Support packages if you need access to our teams and SLAs for both connector and platform issues.  

Retiring the Free Connector Program

With this change, we will be retiring the Free Connector Program. Whereas previously we did not charge customers for using Alpha and Beta connectors, all connectors will now be subject to our standard pricing. 

Current users of free connectors will have until September 18th, 2023 to continue to use them at no charge, to ensure a smooth transition. And of course we will still offer an unpaid trial period for new users, where all syncs are free of charge. 

Why is now the right time for this change? When we initially launched the program in January 2023, the purpose was to increase usage of our connectors to expose edge cases and areas of improvement. And we did it!  

Since the launch of the program, we saw free connectors move over 70 Terabytes of data in over 600,000 syncs. We are now thrilled to be in a position where our average overall sync success rate across all connectors is over 99%! 😀  

If you have any questions about this change, please reach out to hey@airbyte.io.