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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

#51

Post by robbiemitchell »

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…

Segment is best used with identified real users (i.e., you have their email), not anonymous web traffic, mainly because the former is where all the value is and the latter will unnecessarily drive up your bill.

That said, they could consider a cheaper, lightweight option that pipes traffic for you with a single tracker (the original value prop) but without the identify call and custom track calls, which is where all the downstream and up-market value is with respect to personas and the swing to become a CDP.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#52

Post by woodhull »

I really loved Segment when they launched and recommended them repeatedly to anyone who would listen. I can no longer recommend them because of price and instead suggest people hack something together themselves or use Google Tag Manager. It's just not worth getting your company locked in even if they might give you a startup rate right now.

It was also really frustrating to us doing work in the political and advocacy sector that the their EU GDPR Data Processing Agreement explicitly forbids using their product for any of the things our EU clients would need like measuring petition signatures or donations to causes -- since those might be information about "political opinions" which their terms prohibit. This particular GDPR interpretation is somewhat unusual, we've negotiated workable DPAs with almost everyone else we've wanted to do business with but Segment was unmovable.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#53

Post by robbiemitchell »

theflyingkiwi42 wrote: post #4
cornflake wrote: post #2

Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience. Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and…

We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane. Took 1 day to rewrite.

How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#54

Post by robbiemitchell »

idunno246 wrote: post #26
rexreed wrote: post #21

Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?

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…

The real value IMHO is the server-side identification and custom Track events, not the JS tracker.

Being able to instrument marketing AND app events that move data around, and then arbitrarily use webhooks and third-party integrations to further move data around on-demand (e.g., via Zapier or customer.io) or in batch (e.g., nightly updates from Looker) is magical for business teams.

I say this as a member of a 6-person venture-funded startup. Segment has helped us massively leverage a small headcount.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#55

Post by i386 »

Was thinking about using segment here but their pricing is insane.

Many product analytics companies have absolutely crazy pricing. Simply not worth it for the odd experiment, measuring MAU and a few other key metrics.

I think we are likely to setup track.domain.com/event endpoint dumping events into Redshift given that we will use SQL to report anyway.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#56

Post by theflyingkiwi42 »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #53
theflyingkiwi42 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane. Took 1 day to rewrite.

How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?

I don’t recall the exact quote. We do have a ton of traffic (more so back then as it was a freemium product then). Not sure if it included their warehouse as well.

Our dev team at the time said rewriting it internally was impossible, so we actually paid it for 6 months. After changing the team, this was on the top of the list. It was trivial to switch.

Now, all the services that we used were stable so the benefit of easily adding and removing services was not something we needed.

Rightscale suffered similar fate when their rates kept going up. At some point it became cheaper to rewrite it ourselves.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#58

Post by starik36 »

ivolo wrote: post #29
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…

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 guess, I'll throw my hat into the ring as well. Former customer here as well. Just finished pulling out all the Segment hooks from the code base for same reasons as others.

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#59

Post by robbiemitchell »

This thread suggests Segment is anchored to their initial value prop for developers here[1]. To this crowd they seem to be more or less a one-way JS wrapper for websites that can later be replaced with a simple "logs to S3" instrumentation.

From my perspective as a "business ops" person, they graduated past this years ago and have unlocked a ton of value with identity normalization and server-side Track events, particular in moving data around between core product and the services marketing + sales use to acquire and engage customers.

Segment is the one place I can manually push an identity update or Track event and know it will be broadcast back to all the other endpoints, including a warehouse. In addition, the services I use also push their user activity back to Segment as a destination, which then automatically broadcasts it back out to everything else.

Asking product engineers to do all this work every time a new need pops up (a) literally never happens, and (b) if it does happen, drives them crazy because they hate working on that stuff and they'll never touch it again once v1 ships.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076

Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

#60

Post by arborist12 »

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…

We had the same experience. Segment's pricing changes in 2017 were borderline fraudulent. We were automatically switched from the free plan to a plan that cost over $450/month without ever agreeing to it. Segment's "free" plan was a bait and switch, I wouldn't trust it.
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