10M events a month, free • Hacker News Board

Re: 10M events a month, free

#51

Post by scoot » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

aacook wrote: post #49

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 da…

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

I was only referencing the fact that the individual user data appeared to be correct in one view, even though the session length distribution chart was way-off. Had it been off for all users, it would be a big problem, but only affects the first session (See my edit above).

I agree cohort analysis is useful, but not particularly difficult to capture and chart on the server side for web apps, or mobile apps with a server back-end. For SPAs or hybrid or mobile apps you need a facility to capture client side events, which is where something like Amplitude really adds value.

It's one less thing to build or run, but if it's hamstrung by limited reporting, free isn't really free - you have to pay to unlock the value of that event stream.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#52

Post by CanioX » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:02 PM UTC

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…

Success manager from Amplitude here. Sorry to hear that you are having issues. If you want to send a email to support@amplitude.com we can take a look at whats going on!

Re: 10M events a month, free

#53

Post by aacook » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:02 PM UTC

scoot wrote: post #51

aacook wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

> While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they're not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth. I was only referencing the fact that the individual user data appeared to be correct in one view, even though the session length distribution chart was way-off. Had it been off for all users, it would be a big problem, but only affects the first session (See my edit above). I agree c…

Yeah, it's scary to think a bug could exist in the data when you're making potentially huge company decisions based on it.

Some of Amplitude's paid reports do look really valuable. Like this one: https://amplitude.com/behavioral-cohorts

I've written custom reports like this one and I'd rather not have to write them again. It looks like some of the reports are in beta. Maybe they'll release them for free in the future as they work out the kinks.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#54

Post by preetnation » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

sskates wrote: post #41

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!

I can vouch for that. Free is great value (though we are now Premium). Amplitude has been tremendous to use and I can't say enough great things about it as a customer.

Want Analytics? It's spelled Amplitude.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#55

Post by motti » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:03 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.

OTOH if you can afford the time and resources, then human customer support is an excellent source of user research. If you record these customer queries you can discover what's the next bit of functionality that your users want, that your competitors don't provide. You also discover which existing functionality isn't explained well enough.

You can use the normal self-service helpdesk methods to filter out the newbie questions.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#56

Post by preetnation » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

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…

10M is cool and Amplitude is an amazing service. Pretty lame the way you're trying to hijack the thread.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#57

Post by shinymark » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

paladin314159 wrote: post #29

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 th…

Can you say what you charge for SQL access? I have been unsatisfied with 100% of analytics solutions we've tried because of our inability to answer specific questions about how our games are played. SQL or SQL-like query access to the data is something I've wanted for a while.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#58

Post by paladin314159 » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

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…

Thanks for bringing this up! As CanioX mentioned, it'll be easiest for us to figure out what's going on with your numbers if you contact us directly at support@amplitude.com. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us regarding this.

To give a little more context around how web sessions work, the first event creates the session and each subsequent event triggered within 30 min of the previous one will be considered in the same session. The session length is calculated as the time between the first event of the session and the last.

Re: 10M events a month, free

#59

Post by sskates » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

aacook wrote: post #53

scoot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they're not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth. I was only referencing the fact that the individual user data appeared to be correct in one view, even though the session length distribution chart was way-off. Had it been off for all users, it would be a big problem, but only affects the first session (See my edit above). I agree c…

Yeah, it's scary to think a bug could exist in the data when you're making potentially huge company decisions based on it. Some of Amplitude's paid reports do look really valuable. Like this one: https://amplitude.com/behavioral-cohorts I've written custom reports like this one and I'd rather not have to write them again. It looks like some of the reports are in beta. Maybe they'll release them for free in the future…

Let me know what you're looking to do and I can see what could make sense! Send me a note at spenser@amplitude.com

Re: 10M events a month, free

#60

Post by vmind » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 11:03 PM UTC

Looks good, just giving a shot at integrating. On the API, it would be great if your events API would accept a user-agent string, would make generating events on the server easier, and lighten the JS blob for clients.