Improvado vs a custom data warehouse: enterprise marketing data or a commerce model?
Improvado loads 500+ marketing and commerce sources into your warehouse, with MMM and attribution add-ons. Here is what it covers and what still needs modeling.
Linus TseGreyfield DataFacts last checked Contents 10 sections
The short answer
Improvado is built for larger brands and agencies with a lot of marketing sources and a budget starting around $20,000 a year. It loads data into your own warehouse and sells MMM, incrementality, and attribution as add-ons. It does not ship a profit model for ecommerce, so brands that need margin by channel still need that modeling, whether Improvado feeds it or not.
How Improvado and a custom warehouse differ
- 01
Marketing breadth vs commerce depth
Improvado covers hundreds of marketing, sales, and commerce sources. A custom build focuses on the orders, fees, refunds, and costs behind profit.
- 02
Platform fee vs project
Improvado managed plans start around $20,000 a year, priced by rows and sync frequency. A build is a project plus your own Snowflake and BI bills.
- 03
Measurement add-ons
Improvado sells MMM, incrementality, and multi-touch attribution. We do not build those.
Pricing at a glance
Improvado
Independent, venture-backed (founded 2015, San Diego; $22M Series A led by Updata Partners in 2022). No acquisition found.
An enterprise marketing data platform that extracts data from 500+ marketing, sales and commerce sources, transforms it, and loads it into the customer's warehouse or BI tool, with an AI agent and optional attribution, MMM and incrementality add-ons. It is built for larger brands and agencies.
- Pricing model
- Tiered annual subscription priced by rows per year and sync frequency; add-ons priced separately
- Published starting price
- $100/month (MCP Only, 2M rows/year); managed platform from $20,000/year (Starter)
- Free tier
- No - the earlier Free Limited tier was removed in October 2026 (per a third-party pricing tracker)
- What drives cost
- MCP Only: $100/mo, 2M rows/yr, daily sync, 300 MCP actions/week, connects your own AI assistant. Starter: from $20,000/yr, 20M rows/yr, daily sync, all connectors and destinations, 3 governance rules. Growth: from $41,700/yr, 60M-200M rows/yr, daily to twice-daily sync, up to 10 workspaces, Professional Services credits, HIPAA. Enterprise: custom quote, 1B rows/yr, custom sync, unlimited workspaces, SSO. Add-ons: Advanced Analytics (MMM, incrementality, MTA) from $20k/yr; Creative Analytics from $4k/yr. The main cost drivers are rows per year and sync frequency. Connectors and destinations are unlimited and not charged separately, and price does not depend on ad spend. A third-party tracker (PricingSaaS) recorded Growth at $50k/yr during a late-October 2026 repackaging; the vendor page showed 'from $41,700/yr' on 2026-11-03. The vendor says its Amazon connector setup takes under five minutes; no overall onboarding time is published.
Custom warehouse (Greyfield)
A Snowflake warehouse with dbt models and a BI layer (usually Sigma), built around your sources and your definitions, that you own after handover.
- Pricing model
- Project-based build, optional ongoing support
- Published starting price
- Scoped after a free consultation
- Free tier
- No
- What drives cost
- Warehouse, connector, and BI licences are billed by those vendors directly to you.
Feature comparison
"Not verified" means we could not confirm it from public docs, not that the feature is missing. Each cell links to the page we checked.
Sales channels
| Feature | Custom warehouse (Greyfield) | Improvado |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify Native Shopify connector. | Yes Through a managed connector such as Fivetran or Airbyte. source | Yes Shopify GraphQL connector covering orders, refunds, transactions, payouts, products and customers. source |
| Amazon Seller Central Native Amazon connector. | Yes Orders, settlements, and fee events. source | Yes SP-API connector covering orders, inventory, financial events and FBA shipments. Refunds are not available per ASIN. source |
| TikTok Shop Native TikTok Shop connector. | Yes Modeled alongside Shopify and Amazon. source | Not verified No TikTok Shop connector was found; TikTok Ads is supported. source |
| Wholesale, retail, ERP, 3PL Native connectors for sources beyond the online store, such as NetSuite, Faire, retail POS, or a 3PL. | Yes Any source with a connector or export. source | Yes Oracle NetSuite connector covering transactions, invoices, journal entries and inventory. source |
Marketing
| Feature | Custom warehouse (Greyfield) | Improvado |
|---|---|---|
| Ad platform spend Meta, Google, and TikTok ad spend connectors. | Yes Ad spend modeled next to orders. source | Yes Meta, Google and TikTok Ads, among 500+ sources. source |
| Tracking pixel + attribution Its own pixel and multi-touch attribution models. | No Attribution from a dedicated tool can be loaded in. source | Partly Multi-touch attribution is offered in the paid Advanced Analytics add-on. A proprietary tracking pixel was not confirmed. source |
| MMM / incrementality Marketing mix modeling or incrementality testing. | No Not part of a standard build. | Yes MMM and incrementality testing in the Advanced Analytics add-on (from $20k/yr; Growth and Enterprise). source |
Profit and customers
| Feature | Custom warehouse (Greyfield) | Improvado |
|---|---|---|
| Profit with COGS and fees Contribution margin after product cost, shipping, and fees. | Yes Fees, refunds, and cost timing defined in dbt. source | Not verified No prebuilt COGS or contribution-margin model is documented. Data could be modeled with transformations. source |
| LTV and cohorts Lifetime value, cohort, and retention analysis. | Yes Contribution-margin LTV by acquisition channel. source | Partly Customer lifetime value is listed in the Shopify dashboard example. Cohort or retention analysis is not mentioned. source |
| Subscription analytics Recharge or other subscription reporting. | Yes Recharge renewals and skips modeled as events. source | Partly A Recharge Payments connector (subscriptions, charges, orders) delivers raw data. Prebuilt subscription analytics were not found. source |
| Custom metric definitions Define your own metric logic. | Yes Definitions live in dbt models you own. source | Yes Transformation recipes with filters, joins, sources and mappings model data into analysis-ready tables; governance rules are also available. source |
Data access
| Feature | Custom warehouse (Greyfield) | Improvado |
|---|---|---|
| Data in a warehouse you can query Your modeled data lands in Snowflake, BigQuery, or a hosted warehouse you can query with SQL. | Yes Your own Snowflake account. source | Yes Loads into Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, ClickHouse and other warehouses you control. source |
| SQL in the product Write SQL inside the product. | Yes Full SQL in Snowflake and in Sigma. source | Not verified Vendor materials stress no-SQL use, with the agent writing queries. A user-facing SQL editor was not confirmed. source |
| AI assistant Natural-language questions about your data. | Partly Depends on the BI tool; we have built text-to-SQL access for a client. source | Yes The AI Agent answers natural-language questions and builds dashboards. MCP works with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. source |
| Mobile app A native mobile app. | Partly Depends on the BI tool you choose. | Not verified No mobile app was found. source |
What Improvado does well
It loads 500+ sources into Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, and others, with no per-connector fees. Coverage includes Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, Oracle NetSuite, and Recharge. Growth and Enterprise plans include professional services credits, and its AI agent can query your warehouse directly.
For a marketing organization with dozens of ad accounts and a measurement team, the MMM and attribution add-ons replace work that is expensive to staff in-house.
What still needs modeling
Its documentation is candid about commerce gaps. Amazon refunds come per day but not per product per day. One Shopify sales report has no returns fields, so summing it will not match Shopify. Full Shopify history needs a separately approved scope. We found no TikTok Shop connector and no documented contribution-margin model.
That leaves the same work as any pipeline: deciding which revenue each team should report and building margin you can trust.
Where Improvado is better
- A large maintained connector library (500+ sources), including Shopify (GraphQL), Amazon Seller Central (SP-API), Oracle NetSuite and Recharge, with no per-connector fees
- Delivers into a warehouse you control (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, ClickHouse and others), so it can act as the ingestion and normalization layer instead of hand-built ELT
- Advanced Analytics add-ons cover marketing mix modeling, incrementality testing and multi-touch attribution, which are costly to build and staff in-house
- Professional Services credits are included on Growth and Enterprise, so some modeling work is done by the vendor
- An AI Agent answers natural-language questions, builds dashboards and, since January 2026, can query data directly in your BigQuery, Snowflake or MySQL destination
- Governance features (data governance rules), SOC 2 Type II on all plans, and HIPAA on Growth and above
Who should pick which
Pick Improvado if
- You have many marketing sources and accounts and budget for an enterprise platform.
- You want vendor-run MMM, incrementality, or multi-touch attribution.
- You already run a warehouse and want ingestion managed for you.
Pick a custom warehouse if
- Your priority is profit and margin across sales channels, not marketing measurement.
- You sell on TikTok Shop and need its orders modeled with the rest.
- Your budget does not stretch to a $20,000-a-year platform before modeling.
Recommendations by team
| If you are | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise marketing team with a measurement budget | Improvado | Breadth of sources plus MMM and attribution add-ons. |
| Agency managing many brands | Improvado | Workspaces and governance for many accounts. |
| Mid-size DTC brand focused on margin | A custom warehouse | A commerce profit model without a large platform fee. |
| Large brand already on Improvado | Both | Improvado loads the warehouse; the build models commerce on top. |
Recent changes to Improvado
- 2025-09 A major AI Agent update added business-aware insights, instant visualizations, scheduled workflows and MCP support.source
- 2025-10 Launched native AI-built dashboards and automated scheduled reporting, positioning Improvado as an end-to-end marketing intelligence platform.source
- 2026-01 The AI Agent can now query data directly in connected BigQuery, Snowflake and MySQL destinations.source
- 2026-10 Pricing was repackaged: a published Starter ($20k/yr) and Growth tier replaced Advanced (custom), the Free Limited tier was removed, and an Advanced Analytics add-on was introduced (third-party pricing tracker).source
Questions people ask
Does a custom warehouse replace Improvado?
For commerce reporting, often yes, using lighter-weight connectors. For marketing measurement across many sources, no: Improvado’s connector breadth and MMM add-ons are its strengths.
How much does Improvado cost?
An MCP-only plan is $100 a month. Managed plans start at about $20,000 a year for Starter, with Growth higher, priced mainly by rows per year and sync frequency. Advanced analytics add-ons cost extra.
Sources and corrections
We checked these pages on the dates shown. Products change quickly. If you work at Improvado and something here is wrong or out of date, email linus@greyfielddata.com and we will fix it.
- Improvado pricing
- Improvado docs: Shopify GraphQL
- Improvado docs: Amazon Seller Central
- Improvado Amazon Seller Central integration
- Improvado Oracle NetSuite integration
- Improvado docs: Recharge Payments
- Improvado docs: TikTok Ads
- Improvado docs: ClickHouse destination
- Improvado Shopify dashboard page
- Improvado product update: Query destination tool
- Improvado product update: Recipe logic flexibility
- Newswire: Improvado next-generation AI Agent (Sept 2025)
- Press release: Improvado end-to-end platform (Oct 2025)
- Dealroom: Improvado (third-party)
- PricingSaaS: Improvado pricing diff 2026 W44 (third-party)
- Ecommerce data warehouses
- Multi-brand ecommerce portfolio case study
- DTC apparel brand case study
Related comparisons
Supermetrics vs a custom data warehouse: a data pipe or a finished model?
Supermetrics moves marketing and store data into Sheets, Looker Studio, or a warehouse. It does not model profit. Here is how it fits with a custom build.
Triple Whale vs a custom data warehouse: which one does your brand need?
Triple Whale is attribution and dashboards for Shopify brands. A custom warehouse is one source of truth across every channel. Many brands end up running both.
Polar Analytics vs a custom data warehouse: managed Snowflake or your own?
Polar gives every customer a managed Snowflake database with prebuilt ecommerce metrics. Here is when that is enough and when you need models you own.