An ELT platform for the long tail of business apps — the niche sources big vendors skip. No code. Flat price. Straight into your warehouse.
Somewhere in a mid-sized company's analytics team, there is a spreadsheet. Not a dashboard - a wishlist. It holds the names of tools the business actually runs on: the vertical CRM, the billing system built for one industry, the marketing app with a logo nobody outside the sector recognizes. Every one of them holds data the team needs. None of them have a connector. This is the exact spot where Portable stands, and it is not an accident.
Fivetran won't build it. The community connector broke last month. Portable's entire business is that wishlist.
Portable is a data integration platform - specifically an ELT tool, the modern order of operations where you Extract and Load raw data first and Transform it later, inside the warehouse. That part is table stakes. Dozens of vendors move data from Salesforce or Stripe into Snowflake. The crowded center of the market is well served and hotly contested.
What is not served is the edge. There are, by most counts, tens of thousands of business applications in the world, and the large integration vendors rationally chase the few hundred that everyone uses. The math is unforgiving: a connector for a niche app might have a handful of customers, so the incumbents skip it. Portable inverted the logic. The long tail is not a rounding error to route around - it is the whole product.
The company was founded in 2020 by Ethan Aaron, who had come from Goldman Sachs and then LiveRamp, where he ran business intelligence and corporate strategy. He had lived the frustration from the buyer's side: the report that couldn't get built because the data was trapped in a system with no pipe out. So he built the pipe. By hand, at first.
That "by hand" detail matters. For its first stretch Portable was bootstrapped - no venture money, a founder writing connectors one at a time. The insight that turned a service into a company was simple and slightly counterintuitive: the thing you'd normally do as a one-off favor, the custom connector nobody wants to build, can be productized. Package the willingness to build on demand, and coverage becomes the product.
Today the library sits north of 1,500 prebuilt connectors, and the pitch to a data team is refreshingly concrete. Need something that isn't there? Portable's team will research it, build it, and ship it - often in hours or days rather than the quarters a roadmap request would take elsewhere. The public north star is 10,000 connectors. That is not a marketing round number; it is roughly the size of the neighborhood everyone else declined to move into.
Everything lands where analytics teams already live: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and PostgreSQL. No code required to set up a sync, incremental loading so you're not reshipping the world every hour, and - the part that makes finance people exhale - flat pricing. Most of the category bills by data volume, which means your invoice spikes exactly when your business grows. Portable charges by the number of data flows you run, with unlimited volume on every paid plan. The meter is gone.
There is a second, quieter differentiator: support is treated as product, not overhead. When a connector breaks or a source changes its API, the fix is Portable's job, not yours. For a lean team with no spare data engineer, that is the difference between a pipeline and a part-time job.
Point-and-click connectors that extract and load business data into your warehouse with no code and no pipeline babysitting.
Missing a niche source? Portable's team researches and ships a custom connector - typically in hours or days, not roadmap quarters.
Load into Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL with incremental and scheduled syncing.
Flat plans priced by data flows, with unlimited data volume. Your bill doesn't punish you for growing.
Connector maintenance and 24/7 premium support tiers mean broken pipes are Portable's problem, not yours.
Built for analytics teams at agencies and small-to-mid businesses whose data lives in unusual, vertical-specific places.
Priced by enabled data flows, not gigabytes. Numbers are Portable's published monthly plans.
// 14-day free trial on all tiers · unlimited data volumes · SSO & enterprise sources on the top plan · figures approximate, subject to change
"Companies should have data from every business application at their fingertips - all with no code."
Before Portable, Ethan worked at Goldman Sachs, then at LiveRamp as Head of Business Intelligence and Director of Strategy & Corporate Development. He studied mechanical engineering and economics at the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton. He started Portable in 2020, building early connectors by hand before raising a $3.2M seed in 2022.
The insight wasn't a new technology. It was a choice: while everyone else fought over the few hundred apps every company uses, Ethan pointed Portable at the thousands they don't. The unglamorous middle of a market is often the hardest to dislodge.
Ethan Aaron launches Portable in New York to serve the long tail of data sources, hand-building the first connectors.
The company operates without outside funding, proving that on-demand connector building can be a product rather than a favor.
Fresh capital funds connector coverage, support, and a globally distributed team spanning five continents.
The library crosses 1,500 prebuilt integrations, with a stated ambition of scaling to 10,000 built on demand.
In a category crowded with Fivetran, Airbyte, Stitch, Hevo, Integrate.io and Meltano, Portable stakes out three claims competitors find hard to copy.
Niche and vertical-specific sources are the priority, not an afterthought routed around.
Custom connectors delivered in hours or days - a service rivals reserve for enterprise contracts.
Flat pricing while most of the field bills by data volume that spikes as you grow.
That spreadsheet of sources the team wished it could sync? One by one, the names move off it - into a warehouse table, into a dashboard, into a decision. The wishlist gets shorter. That is the whole point of Portable: to make the phrase "that app doesn't have a connector" quietly obsolete.