61–70 of 70 posts
I dunno. The way I look at it, whatever you could have been working on to advance your company when Mixpanel took care of things, you weren't when you were building this and can't when you have to maintain it.
MixPanel costs $X per month. That cost only increases. Self-based solution costs $Y to build and $Z to operate.
delta = $Z x n - ($Y + $Z x n)
Solve for that delta.
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How is GKE cheaper than GCE?
I think I messed up my branding.. I think GKE and GCE are now the same thing? I was thinking GKE = Kubernetes, and GCE = was their "run container on a VM" thing, but I think GKE and GCE are the same thing...
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I had the opposite reaction. If you're in a big city in the US, $240K is the cost including overhead of one, maybe two engineers. If running this in-house takes up a total of a full-time engineering load (i.e., if the team maintaining this wants to add headcount to run this and maintain prior commitments), you haven't saved very much and you might be net negative. (The math may be different in different job markets,…
$240K for 1 Engineer? Wow-zie
$192K ($240k/1.25) is definitely common; $120K ($240k/2) is low in these markets for someone who knows what they're doing.
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> There's a reason MixPanel (and any other vendor) has so many engineers. You're paying them to have already made the mistakes that you're about to make. The real reason Mixpanel (et al) have so many engineers is: A) They need to scale their service to reliably provide to N corporations which is frequently non-trivial. B) They need to implement the 80% of features that aren't critical path for Company A because some…
The number of engineers they have is irrelevant to the point. The point is you pay someone to worry about a specific thing so you don't have to and (hopefully) their expertise leads to a better product than you could have built.
Yeah, and in my experience, that frequently fails to materialize which why I mentioned point C.
Now, that could be arrogance on my part but it doesn't change my experience on the quality of the vast majority of outside software vendors.
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$240K for 1 Engineer? Wow-zie
It's not uncommon at all in the expensive markets (I'm thinking SFBA and NYC) for an engineer who isn't straight out of college. But I'm counting overhead - recruiting, benefits, employer-paid taxes, space, equipment, amortized cost of just becoming a bigger company (helpdesk, possibly management, etc.). Depending on how you count, that could add anywhere from 25% to over 100% to the employee's take-home compensation…
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$240K for 1 Engineer? Wow-zie
It's not uncommon at all in the expensive markets (I'm thinking SFBA and NYC) for an engineer who isn't straight out of college. But I'm counting overhead - recruiting, benefits, employer-paid taxes, space, equipment, amortized cost of just becoming a bigger company (helpdesk, possibly management, etc.). Depending on how you count, that could add anywhere from 25% to over 100% to the employee's take-home compensation…
This article epitomizes the old adage: software engineers are terrible at estimating. I have absolutely no stake in Mixpanel, and it has its own flaws, but seeing something as misleading as this on the front page of HN means I have to write a clarifying, if not somewhat edifying, comment =/ 1. Right off the bat, there's the cost of building all of this + maintaining it. Something like Mixpanel at scale requires at le…
That last part is the most important. It's why you're really using Mixpanel/Amplitude/other vendors. To say "we replaced Mixpanel" without addressing the front end feels a bit disingenuous to me.
Does anyone have any experience of negotiating your costs down with Mixpanel? Years ago I remember my CTO ringing up our hosting provider and in the space of a phone call bringing some of our costs down 90%.
The "backend" would have been a perfect problem to be solved by Google's Cloud Functions (i.e. serverless), rather than a Kubernetes cluster with Node and nginx.
The easy and cheap way to keep mixpanel cost under control is sample events or send only unique events per session.