Data pipeline illustration

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Mozart Data, a San Francisco-based startup providing modern data stack out of the box for enterprises, today announced a free tier of its product: Mozart Sonata.

The offering provides core capabilities of Mozart’s paid service free of cost, giving companies open access to a one-stop shop to be more data-driven. As the Y Combinator-backed company explains, it covers everything needed to drive value from data, right from tools to extract, load and transform data to a data warehouse (Mozart’s or Snowflake instance already in use) with tools to centralize that information and build dashboards for business insights. 

Historically, the cost of implementing data infrastructure and hiring specialist engineers have been major roadblocks to achieving data-driven operations, especially for early-stage companies.

Limits on usage from Mozart Data

Speaking with VentureBeat, Mozart Data CEO and cofounder Peter Fishman noted that while Sonata provides a good platform to start implementing its all-in-one service and drive value from data, there will be certain compute and row usage limits with the free offering.

“Mozart Data currently connects over 400 sources to Snowflake,” he explained. “With Sonata, companies can typically load two to three sources, depending on data volumes without hitting row limits. B2B companies are typically more likely to be able to get a bit more relevant information (because the transaction volumes are less than B2C) from this.”

Data transformation in Mozart Sonata

Eventually, the company expects that the freemium offering will increase its user base and direct some of those new customers to the paying category.

“As companies want to enrich their segments for analysis with more and more data from different sources, we believe they’ll see the value in their business intelligence and upgrade to plans that offer more volume, like a Dropbox with storage,” said Fishman. “The goal is for users to focus on their specific product and business challenges. As users see value in data, they often want to expand the footprint to inform more of the business. It may start with sales & marketing, but evolve to product (or vice-versa). The hope for Sonata is to grow with the company.”

Early response

Team Mozart tested the Sonata tier with a handful of companies via Y Combinator and found that they all derived value within the first two weeks of using the service. According to the CEO, most of the testers didn’t face the need to bump usage limits — but at least one is looking to connect more data and might be upgrading to the paid plan. 

Currently, Mozart Data has about 100 paying customers, including Scratchpad, Modern Treasury, QuotaPath, Zeplin and Aalto. 

Nathan Mayer, head of business operations at Aalto, detailed the experience of the paid version, noting that Mozart doesn’t need data engineering expertise and the hard cost of using the platform was lesser than building a data stack in-house.