looks great but you should take a look at your pricing structure! pricing is extremely difficult so I don't mean to over-criticise, the thing is that you've basically priced yourself out for 90% of potential customers, especially larger ones
Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#102Yes! I've been doing this for awhile. If you feed the data into a Bayesian classifier, you can figure out what kind of user you're dealing with, too.
That sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?
Sure. The simplest approach is to use a naive Bayesian classifier (you can find a bunch of open source implementations).
In my app, I actually track client-side actions -- essentially, clicks, but with more context. Anyway, you can treat a single user session like you would the text of an email, where the "actions" are the words.
From there, all you need to do is capture a bunch of sessions and tell the classifier which users are not strong computer users and which know what they're doing, passing the corresponding "documents".
Now you can feed in new documents and determine which of your users know what they're doing, and which aren't really computer users.
(It my experience, people fall into one of those two camps.)
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#103What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500 users/month).
I know you're reworking the pricing page as you said but you may want to consider doing what a lot of email service providers do and list the per-user price in tiers. Something like * Users 1-2,500: $0.01/user * Users 2,501-20,000: $0.0625/user * Users 20,001-80,000: $0.0583/user might be a tad more intuitive, especially if you listed the top-end price along with that.
I don't think per user is the way to go. Customers want more predictability. Plus, per user feels like it's penalizing growers. It seems a bit more appropriate to charge per/email since there's som atomicity there.
For analytics, simple tiers (without pro rating) should work fine.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel free to reach us at sales@heapanalytics.com. We'd love to talk about fair pricing, and we certainly need more data points to evaluate what that fair pricing is.
Do you feel there's scope for pricing coming down a lot? I'm in a similar boat to TylerE: around a million monthly uniques, but in publishing, so there's really no way to justify $4k/month for Analytics when stuff like Google's already exists. 10% of that might be justifiable, but even then it's not a no-brainer.
Yea, precisely. I'd say for us we could maybe to like, $100/month. Also - how does it work for multiple sites? We actually have 4 separate sites for separate towns.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#106I love the concept, definitely addresses a pain point in using other platforms. The thing I worry about is when I make some change to the styles or HTML structure of my site I have to now consider how that will break my analytics.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#107Dumb question but how does this work? Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate. So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.
It means that if you start tracking on day X, then on day Y you decide you want to generate a certain report, the data is already there, you don't have to start tracking anything new.
But also if you change your page structure your reports might stop working
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#108Poor man's analytics: events, client side, server side, whatever. Set up a separate DB with one big table, many columns for properties. One server call to write an event (a row), one ajax call to write from the client, throw it wherever you need. A bit of good old simple SQL for queries and reporting, and you are done.
yeah or I could just pay them $25 / month and let them pay for bandwidth on their own server time
you still have the issue of another party domain and all the blockers
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#109Reticulating Splines!! Amazing Maxis reference, I'm sold.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#110I'm positive there is a market for it. Unfortunately "capturing everything" has an unsolvable problem beyond capture performance, storage cost and query performance (which are hard but solvable) - it let's you find the outcome you were looking for all along.
This is a really good point - blind data analysis without any notion of multiple hypothesis testing leads to false positives. This XKCD is a great illustration of that: http://xkcd.com/882/ This is something we're thinking about and are definitely conscious of.
Not just false positives in a confirm/deny scenario. It can also lead to overfitting in a modeling scenario.
I once created a model that showed very strongly that US/China exchange rates were a driver of revenue. This model was intuitive based on the market dynamics as we understood them, and they helped provide a strong predictive power which helped reduce operational costs. Over time, this model began to be taken as irrefutable truth among quite a few people in the org. Then when the economy collapsed, we very quickly learned that it wasn't US/China exchange rates that was the strong predictor, but rather something else which correlated with those rates.
Not only was the model broken, but it had now breeched trust in the ability of model based forecasts. In other words, if I were a business, I would be bankrupt.
I think the best value-add that you can possibly provide with your service is a way of helping your customers understand what is meaningful and what isn't.