Rudder, an open source Segment alternative • Hacker News Board

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#21

Post by soumyadeb » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

HillRat wrote: post #20

soumyadeb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I don't think we even understand the problem :) You mean, it would be hard to work with all the 200 or so 3rd party providers segment integrates with without having 1-1 relationships with them?

That’s definitely one advantage they have in the market, but it’s also related to your sales strategy. You’re looking for companies that have both the need for large-scale streaming customer and analytics data routing and transformation, no existing investment in Segment, and the ability to manage the on-prem IT and development load. While you can probably go after smaller and more agile fish with, e.g., recipes for…

Hmm, honestly we don't have any connections into those. Would love to connect with you if you can help us.

Interestingly, some of our initial pilots chose us not so much for privacy but for pricing. Segment's pricing doesn't work if you have a lot of free users (free games, online bloggers etc. There was a hackernews thread on this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19220518

We want to compete on the privacy angle but looks like the pricing might get us the initial downloads.

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#22

Post by dacompton » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

The majority of risk lies outside of Segment and they are damned serious about the risk they own

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#23

Post by soumyadeb » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

dacompton wrote: post #22

The majority of risk lies outside of Segment and they are damned serious about the risk they own

I am sure they do. We have great respect for segment. However, at some point/scale a company needs to take ownership of their their user-data.

Yes, some events may go to 3rd party vendors (analytics, advertising) but not everything goes and those often have PII removed. We want Rudder to be the point where you decide and enforce what goes where.

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#24

Post by vollmarj » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

As a longtime segment customer, I am excited to see this exist. Segment's product is fairly good but their pricing model is really bad. We recently ran into an issue where they were billing us for almost 10x the number of users we were actually tracking. It was a nightmare that required a few months of back and forth with their support trying to get it fixed. In the end, they gave us a partial refund for the overages but we had to do a lot of technical work to resolve the issue ourselves.

It would be nice to have an open source alternative that doesn't get you locked into an unpredictable pricing model that you have very little control over.

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#25

Post by dinrat » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

this is so awesome! i have been waiting for it.

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#26

Post by techdragon » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

soumyadeb wrote: post #19

techdragon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you have chosen the SSPL in order to stop companies free riding off your work, you may want to also look at https://licensezero.com as another license option for this or other work you release. “Open source” software and “free” software as concepts have become entangled to an unhealthy level. Burnout and software project sustainability issues are important to be aware of and manage if we want to have successful…

Thanks for the reference and for your words of encouragement. Will check out licensezero and DM you if we have any questions.

Sure! Email is in my profile, feel free to DM. :-)

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#27

Post by soumyadeb » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

vollmarj wrote: post #24

As a longtime segment customer, I am excited to see this exist. Segment's product is fairly good but their pricing model is really bad. We recently ran into an issue where they were billing us for almost 10x the number of users we were actually tracking. It was a nightmare that required a few months of back and forth with their support trying to get it fixed. In the end, they gave us a partial refund for the overages…

Some of our initial pilots had similar problems. Segment's pricing also doesn't work when you have a lot of free users. That(and privacy) are the two pain points we hope to address with this.

Happy to help you try this out if you want (please email soumyadeb@rudderlabs.com). We are behind on number of integrations (vs segment) and features but we will catch-up. And hoping to get community support on that.

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#28

Post by soumyadeb » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

tankster wrote: post #17

Segment has done an awesome job of building a great product but it is impossible to be provably secure and private given that they host all the data. Rudder can avoid situations such as the Segment Security incident that happened recently. https://segment.com/security/bulletins/incident090519/ Very excited about this project!

Thanks :)

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#29

Post by soumyadeb » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

dinrat wrote: post #25

this is so awesome! i have been waiting for it.

Thank you :)

Re: Rudder, an open source Segment alternative

#30

Post by indianCoder » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

One issue I had with Segment, I couldn't run real-time transformation of the event to join data from our data tables. We eventually got over it with AWS Lambda and sending it back to Segment. Segment recently announced functions to help on this, still could not get my hands on it.

Any plans on this?