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10M events a month, free

amplitude.com

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Re: 10M events a month, free

#41

Post by sskates »

PabloOsinaga wrote: post #37

sskates/et al: This is awesome - we will be trying it. We've built internal tools very similar to what you guys are doing, so it's great that we have the option to not do that anymore! Question: I am super tempted at using the free tier, and just route a sample of users towards Amplitude. After all, using just a sample is enough to discover patterns, test hypothesis and identify product-change ideas. While the ~$1000…

That's great to hear you're planning to use Amplitude!

I'll personally guarantee that we'll never remove stuff from the current free plans- in fact we hope to add features to the free plan and increase it's volume as time goes on. Let me know if you need any other guarantees!

Re: 10M events a month, free

#43

Post by sskates »

scalayer wrote: post #38

What's your security story? A search for "security" or "privacy" on your help docs returns zero results. The privacy policy makes no mention of any certifications (SOC 2 Type II, Tier 3 SSAE 16, TRUSTe, third-party audits, etc). How can I trust my data with your service?

Here you go: https://amplitude.com/privacy

We're also in the middle of a 3rd party SOC 2 audit right now.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#44

Post by gorkemcetin »

You know what? 10 million is not cool, but 1 billion is. Nowadays many apps already can exceed this many API requests. If you go with an open source and self-hosted solution, then you can have a billion events per month for free, on a modest Linux server. Have a look at Piwik and Countly for mobile & web analytics that. Both companies have a lot more on-prem options for a fraction of price of analytics companies ask for, due to the fact that they build their pricing on number of servers and not API calls.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#45

Post by durga »

efuquen wrote: post #33
paladin314159 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

This is awesome, it's exactly what we have been looking for. Our business analytics team is very comfortable with SQL and it's been a pain finding any analytics platform that offers that sort of access to the data. And on top of that they are super expensive, so we've gone the hosting our own solution with Redshift route. But our tech team is small and maintaining an analytics platform has been a distraction so we re…

We have been using Amplitude at 12 Labs (getapplause.com) after having tried several analytics platforms, and it's an amazing platform. Large free tier, really intuitive interface, and the tracking is really accurate (we did rigorous testing to verify that).

Re: 10M events a month, free

#46

Post by melvinram »

gorkemcetin wrote: post #44

You know what? 10 million is not cool, but 1 billion is. Nowadays many apps already can exceed this many API requests. If you go with an open source and self-hosted solution, then you can have a billion events per month for free, on a modest Linux server. Have a look at Piwik and Countly for mobile & web analytics that. Both companies have a lot more on-prem options for a fraction of price of analytics companies ask…

When you're ready to give away 1 billion, feel free to create a HN post to announce it.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#47

Post by scoot »

Well, this was stupidly easy to integrate into a web-app, but my first (and only) session has consistently been grouped into the 30-60 minute session length bucket, from the moment the session was born (first event logged) to ten minutes later.

(The user event stream for the individual user shows the correct session length though.)

This would make me wary of the rest of the data. Not to mention that all of the more interesting reports are in the paid plans, which makes 10M free events that you can't report on of limited value.

Edit: The first event for the first user / session in the "real-time activity details" has a usage time of "20 min", wheras the first event for the second user / session starts at 0 seconds, so the bug lies there somewhere, and seems like it shouldn't have a meaningful impact on statistics for an app in production with lots of users, but disconcerting for a first-time dev-user of Amplitude to see bogus values.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#48

Post by shostack »

sskates wrote: post #25
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…

That is actually shocking about not trusting the results. From the screenshot, they appear easy enough to verify (although some might require significant resources to implement/act on).

Out of curiosity, what sorts of things was your initial attempt spitting out as insights?

Also, as someone likely in your target audience (senior digital marketing/analytics guy), I have a suggestion for your site that I see lots of similar businesses fall victim to.

I want to see how the product works without investing time or having a sales conversation so I can determine if there might be sufficient fit to even warrant investing more of my extremely limited time.

You have some small screenshots and some marketing text. Consider adding a full demo account with pre-populated data that people can poke around in WITHOUT providing an email address. At the very least give me full-screen images when I click a screenshot. I want to see your interface. I want to see what data looks like in there, how I can expect to manipulate it, create reporting views, filter, etc. And again, I want to do all this without being pestered by a sales person or being added to a list.

The marketer in me is saying "well, maybe consider A/B testing gating such a demo behind an email capture or more involved signup form", but the other part of me that gets pestered by sales people for things like this day in and day out, and really geeks out on this stuff is screaming "just let me see the F-ing product!"

Re: 10M events a month, free

#49

Post by aacook »

scoot wrote: post #47

Well, this was stupidly easy to integrate into a web-app, but my first (and only) session has consistently been grouped into the 30-60 minute session length bucket, from the moment the session was born (first event logged) to ten minutes later. (The user event stream for the individual user shows the correct session length though.) This would make me wary of the rest of the data. Not to mention that all of the more i…

What questions are you trying to answer about your web-app?

While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they're not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth.

One of the best charts for doing that is a simple cohort analysis / retention chart. If you've been storing historical data about your users in your database or in a log file, one thing you could try is importing historical data into Amplitude and then looking at your retention chart. I just finished doing this for a friend in Mixpanel earlier today. Here's the result: http://aacook.co/retention.png

This chart only uses two user events (Sign Up and some usage event you define) but tells you so much. Week/week acquisition (number of new users signing up) is in the first column, new user activation in the 2nd column (number of new sign ups who reached a moment of value) and a basic form of retention (number of users coming back at week N).

In my friend's startup, they're doing a great job with new user acquisition but they have a clear onboarding/activation problem. Less than half of new sign ups reach the authentic usage state. In the following week, another 50% of those users drop off.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#50

Post by shostack »

sskates wrote: post #26
mathattack wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From experience testing Domo, RJ Metrics and Looker (which we ultimately went with), I know the ETL and modeling piece of integration can be extensive.

I'm curious to what degree you plan on assisting customers with that. While we have a team dedicated to working on this stuff now, initially one plus that RJ Metrics had going for them in my mind was that they had unlimited support that explicitly handled the modeling once we handled the ETL, and had dedicated analysts on our account.

Now, the obvious tradeoff there is that they don't know our data as well as we do, and all data has nuances. But for a fledgling company that can't dedicate manpower to analytics because they need to ship the product, that is a big game changer.

Ultimately we went with Looker for several other reasons, but that is an interesting factor to consider with your approach to sales/marketing.

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