Amazon Mobile Analytics

Amazon Mobile Analytics
aws.amazon.com

Also, I understand that Amazon includes 'System Events' in their free tier. Even with this included, at an average of 15 custom events + 5 system events, you can have 5MM sessions a month for FREE. This is more than enough for bootstrapped companies/projects to start and grow with.

I'm not sure who the customers for these analytics companies are (small projects that grow with them vs big projects that join them) but if it is the latter, well Amazon is def. the better choice. Although they do not offer any complex funnels/segmentation, I am sure this and other features will be added in the future.

Thinking about Peter Thiel's monopoly vs competition eating profits (Zero to One, awesome book!), I wonder if and how players in this space will be able to differentiate themselves enough to really have a competitive advantage over one another.

This is far more of a competitor to Google Analytics instead of us. Google Analytics gives away their product for free - by that measure this is expensive!

Though biased, I wanted to point out a few things since this isn't as amazing as one might think -- it comes with several gotchas (and please correct me if I am wrong):

- Systems events will take up a LARGE portion of this free tier and the paid tiers. Start and End events are going to put reasonably sized apps into the billions.

- If you manage to get rid of said system events, big parts of the dashboard are likely to be rendered useless like DAU, MAU, retention, etc.

- You cannot deeply segment any of this information so you will have a lot of questions remaining even just the next day

- It will be difficult to offer funnel analysis (which doesn't exist) that is retroactive at that scale. That means you will get the same kind of funnel that people hate with Google Analytics' goals.

- Generally speaking: complexity of analysis will mean higher prices

While Mixpanel pricing may seem expensive by comparison, the products are not comparable. You get what you pay for in the level of sophisticated analysis.

Given that, over time it is our plan to lower prices relative to the rate that hardware and infrastructure becomes less expensive. We think that's fair. And if we can improve our technology to become more efficient we most certainly want to make our software and products more accessible.

We are very open to your thoughts so please be harsh and candid (as I know HN can be). We deeply care about our startup customers who made and pushed us into who we are today.

You know, Analytics + SNS + SES would make up a nice a little marketing automation solution and I wouldn't mind building my own reports in R or whatever.

However, there's no way to retrieve and reuse any data through the API. Seems like a major opportunity loss with AWS users as target audience.