10M events a month, free • Hacker News Board

Re: 10M events a month, free

#21

Post by Mahn » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service always expects you to do things in a certain way at the end of the day. Which is understandable, because you can't have a fully featured dashboard right off the bat without an opinion about how should that work and be presented, so as an analytics provider it isn't an easy problem to solve unless you go the keen.io route and offer an analytics as back-end service only.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while services like these are great, I find that eventually after a certain size startups will almost always need to have in-house analytics infrastructure to cover all use cases and needs specific to the business. Not that services like Amplitude don't have their place, which they do, I just wish there was an universal solution to that problem. But I suppose you can't help rolling your own infrastructure given specific enough needs.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#22

Post by nickchmura » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing serious money. For your system to not have a ton of questions during onboarding and throughout to the average user, would be amazing. Or is this an expense you plan to eat for now as you grow?

Re: 10M events a month, free

#23

Post by mathattack » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

nickchmura wrote: post #22

What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing serious money. For your system…

In theory there should be no support for most customers on the free model. Having a cost with no associated revenue is bad. This is different if you're looking to bump prices later or get a special reference, but this doesn't seem to be that kind of case.

The other strategy companies use is "Burn out the support team by starving them for resources" but I don't like that either.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#24

Post by 7cupsoftea » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

We just migrated over to Amplitude and they've been great to work with. With another company we were maxing out our # of events pretty regularly. The solution was to upgrade, but each new tier was significantly more. In a startup, you want to measure more items, not less, so this model makes a lot of sense. Varun and Bryan have been great to work with. I'm also pretty excited to start working with their data science team. Feel free to ask me any questions. I highly recommend these guys!

Re: 10M events a month, free

#25

Post by sskates » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

shostack wrote: post #12

This is great for companies without a lot of data yet. Often times a big hurdle is the large price tag based on volume, when a company may have no clue as to their actual volume benchmarks because they haven't gotten as far as tracking their event data to the level they could/should. So a salesperson asks how many events they would have, and the response is "how the hell should I know?" Your growth discovery engine f…

Because we have a huge infrastructure advantage, we try to structure it in a way where you don't even have to worry about data volume- as long as it's not killing us on server costs we're fine.

We actually tried to make a fully automated version of growth discovery engine and customers hated it! To our surprise- people don't trust the result if Amplitude hands it out on a silver platter. They want control in setting up the analysis so they know what they're getting out of the system. It's the same sort of aversion people have towards "magic" in programming. Eventually as people get more comfortable we'll automate more of it!

Re: 10M events a month, free

#26

Post by sskates » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #23

nickchmura wrote: post #22

What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing serious money. For your system…

In theory there should be no support for most customers on the free model. Having a cost with no associated revenue is bad. This is different if you're looking to bump prices later or get a special reference, but this doesn't seem to be that kind of case. The other strategy companies use is "Burn out the support team by starving them for resources" but I don't like that either.

One of the nice things about raising a Series A is it allows us to be more aggressive in doing things that don't have an immediate ROI- helping out people who aren't paying us is one of them. We view it as a long term marketing expense to make future potential paying customers happy.

The other way to attack it is to do things that scale better- for example better onboarding documentation or hosting webinars.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#27

Post by sskates » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

nocturne wrote: post #20

sskates wrote: post #3

Hi all, founder of Amplitude here. We've always felt volume based pricing to be bad for analytics culture as it discourages tracking and so are taking as aggressive of a stance as we can here. Would love HN's feedback!

Oh, hello Spenser-- haven't seen you in years. We went to MIT together. Congrats on the launch!

Hello! Definitely miss MIT. Can't find anything on your profile, who am I talking with?

Re: 10M events a month, free

#28

Post by blader » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #21

The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service al…

Have you looked at Amplitude? Because those reasons are exactly why I became a customer (and later an investor)

If you ever get to that point, you can use raw Redshift access to do whatever queries you want. I used to use Zynga's pretty state of the art analytics infrastructure, and Amplitude dashboard was the only thing that covered most of my edge cases. For the rest you can always go raw SQL.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#29

Post by paladin314159 » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #21

The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service al…

Engineer at Amplitude here. Thanks for your thoughts!

We've been thinking a lot about this exact issue over the last few years and have come to the same conclusion: when dealing with a platform that provides a ton of value out of the box, you need to be somewhat opinionated, and you can't expect to cover every use case. Different customers can have very different questions about their data and unique insights that they want to discover.

To address that, we offer direct SQL access to the raw data in Amazon Redshift. While Redshift isn't the best solution for powering high-performance, realtime dashboards, its main benefit is that it supports most of the SQL standard, which means that you can answer close to any question about the data. This duality of the fast, easy-to-use dashboards that provide immediate value and the flexibility of Amazon Redshift for deeper, customized queries has helped a lot of our customers overcome the problems you describe.

Hope this makes sense, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

Re: 10M events a month, free

#30

Post by logicuce » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #21

The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service al…

I think Amplitude gives you access to the RedShift cluster which is hosting your data. You can then connect it to any custom vizualization tool and analyze it to your satisfaction.