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Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

segment.com

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Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#41

Post by ivolo »

chanfest22 wrote: post #40
nlh wrote: post #27

I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a won…

100% agree. We are working on a YC W18 company (www.cointracker.io) and loved that Segment made it easy to get up and running on a bunch of metrics platforms. Really slick product! Unfortunately, the recent price hikes are completely out of line with the value we are getting with the product and we are being financially forced to stop using the service. Chatting with the sales team has been extremely painful and unhe…

Thanks Chandan, we're hearing this loud and clear. Open to give us feedback on pricing/packaging changes we're working on? If you're willing, can you send me an email at: ilya @segment.com

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#42

Post by amanzi »

I too tried their product, loved it, but couldn't use it because of the insane pricing -- despite me having a fairly small website and just wanting to get better insights to help start making a profit. I quickly exceeded their free limits (within two weeks) and the jump up to $200 per month was just ludicrous. I was also contacted by a very friendly sales/support person but they just couldn't see how spending $200 per month just wouldn't be feasible for me.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#43

Post by idunno246 »

IMTDb wrote: post #28
idunno246 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk. Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button. Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it o…

You are describing google tag manager, not segment.

sure, segment is just a fancy tag manager. It's similar enough that they specifically have a page calling out the differences: https://segment.com/docs/guides/general/what-is-the-differen...

which amounts to, the data goes through them first, so "Because we store the data, we also have the ability to replay your historical data into new tools and give you acccess to your raw data in a SQL data warehouse."

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#44

Post by zizee »

meetbryce wrote: post #38
raleigh_user wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One product worth checking out might be simpleanalytics.io. its a small company that doesn't track your data. And its cheap. Not entirely sure of your use case but ive seen a good amount of people saying screw the data collectors Ill roll my own and it seems some of what you might be looking for is available from simple (I have no affiliation, just appreciate alternatives to the huge tech companies)

this isn't even relevant. your spam strategy needs work.

Why are you saying grandparent's comment isn't relevant and is spam?

The product recommendation seems like an alternative to Segments offering (albiet simpler), and the commenter claims no affiliation.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#45

Post by sb8244 »

Zaheer wrote: post #34
idunno246 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk. Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button. Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it o…

This seems like a one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure. Is the one-time cost of doing these integrations really worth the monthly cost of Segment? There must be some other value they provide?

I think one of the big ones is that, if setup right, you should be able to change tracking tools and not change your frontend code. They may be banking on the setup cost to be potentially expensive (engineers time) but the buyers are not in engineering (so value the engineers time highly).

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#47

Post by quickthrower2 »

ivolo wrote: post #8
quickthrower2 wrote: post #5

They need to define "Startup". What about an established business with a new 'startup'-like product?

We define startups as new companies with <2 years since founding and <$5M in funding. We have soft limits, and we'd love to hear from you either way.

The form assumes you are <2yr/<$5m. So should I email you with details of our company. We are already a customer.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#48

Post by RonanTheGrey »

buf wrote: post #39
ivolo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that we're reading/listening and this is really helpful feedback. I'd love to do a phone call, and get your feedback on a few pricing/packaging changes we're working on. If you're willing, my email is ilya @segment.com

I'm in the same boat. I love love love segment at Reforge (and I hear Segment loves Reforge, too). I've built some pretty awesome data pipelines (Personas are my favorite feature of all time) and have armed the marketing team to the teeth. But my side project, Casting Call Club, has 150k uniques a month, most of which are not monetized. There's just simply no way I can justify paying for Segment. Many of the ideas I…

We get almost 500,000 uniques a month, mostly unmonetized (though that's changing, slowly). I would LOVE to integrate an enterprise tracker but the pricing is just absurd. I mean, there's no way we can even 'try' it. We grew alot faster in organic traffic than we expected.

It's definitely meant for large enterprises, not for growing ones.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#49

Post by heliodor »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #18
webmobdev wrote: post #3

If you run a business, I really don't understand the appeal of sharing a crucial part of your data (for web based applications / services) with a third-party (Google, Amazon etc. or maybe even Segments in the future) that may at some point compete with you ... especially when you can just parse your own web logs ...

Agreed. I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's + timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something unique then you're better off building your own analytics. Also, realistically most businesses are buil…

Self-hosting your analytics is probably the better way to go. There's Piwik (name has changed to Matomo at some point) and I noticed Countly also has an open-source version your can host yourself. There's a lot of functionality in analytics software and you should not throw it all away and roll your own simplistic thing when you can just take a quality open-source product and host it yourself.

But I agree that applications have unique things about them and for those, people need to implement their own metrics to measure whatever interests them. In that case, the current best choices for time-series database are InfluxDB and Prometheus. They provide very simple APIs and tools for collecting and transmitting metrics, and if you prefer to store aggregations of your metrics instead of the many individual data points, you can use the very simple but powerful StatsD api/client/library/package.

Shameless plug: My company HostedMetrics (https://HostedMetrics.com) offers hosted and fully managed InfluxDB and Prometheus. It includes everything needed for a turnkey metrics platform that is ready to accept your metrics the moment you create an account: StatsD for data transmission, Grafana for dashboards, and the alerting functionalities of InfluxDB/Prometheus.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#50

Post by jbwyme »

chanfest22 wrote: post #40
nlh wrote: post #27

I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a won…

100% agree. We are working on a YC W18 company (www.cointracker.io) and loved that Segment made it easy to get up and running on a bunch of metrics platforms. Really slick product! Unfortunately, the recent price hikes are completely out of line with the value we are getting with the product and we are being financially forced to stop using the service. Chatting with the sales team has been extremely painful and unhe…

Just curious, what are the reasons to be on "a bunch of metrics platforms"? Specifically, what are the various problems you were trying solve with different tools?
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