This landing page (especially the code/data example) is the best example on why we need something like GDPR. "Look how easy it is, I'll just send your personal identifiable data everywhere at once!!"
Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#72Earlier 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?
>> tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team
> one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure
As the marketer regularly making these requests, it's by no means a one-time problem, and I can attest to being hated by our tech team (for some reason they don't appreciate me hiding random JS code in our CMS to save on these requests either...).
GTM would solve many of the problems for us as we store all of our customer data in CRM anyway, but for other orgs that don't have a massive CRM policy, having an essentially outsourced data warehouse might be valuable.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
In our case we route analytics to Google Analytics, Intercom, and a Postgres database (using Segment's warehousing support) - that gives us high level analytics for marketing, customer support tooling, and raw data for the team who work with that.
We provide a white labelled platform for a few enterprise customers as well, and Segment allows us to route data to the appropriate accounts for each of those services, rather than having to set everything up manually each time.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#74Segment is great for early-stage startups as it takes care of data pipeline for you so that you don't need to hire data engineers or waste time downloading reports from marketing tools and analyzing data offline using a BI solution or Excel.
Since it doesn't provide any user interface that allows you to get insights from Segment data, you need to use a BI tool in order to be able to make use of this data which also requires you to dedicate resource and spend some time on it.
Early stage startups usually don't have enough time and resource so we have been working on a tool that allows you to integrate Segment data-warehouse and run segmentation, funnel and retention queries. You can think of it as Mixpanel UI for your Segment data. Here is the details: https://rakam.io/integration/segment/
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#75This is an email I just sent internally:
XXXX,
Yeah....We need to have a conversation and push back on them-
IMHO, Segments pricing starts breaking down as company's scale because of a couple factors, that generally allow people to push back.
Some of these reasons (that I know of...and I'm sure you know better), are:
1. Google tag manager is free
2. Many services, like Marketo, don't allow Segment to use their universal javascript widget...so you end up using Segment as a tag manager to push that provider's proprietary widget...reducing the value of Segment. In fact, if you look at the "www." side of our website, we could directly instrument 2 sdk's and remove segment (so net +1 javascript library) and dump segment all together. This would also significantly reduce the unique people count...how they bill!
3. We'll soon have a full-time front engineer focused on the website...So it's not very painful to instrument a new sdk, or add a shared cookie between sdk's.
4. There are options that are really good at moving log files (e.g., fluentd.org) for server side logging. It's how the big boys move log files :)
5. According to google analytics...we're at XX,XXX across webapp + www, so not sure why they are saying YYY,YYY
I realize there's value in Segment, but we can push back on pricing increases.
One last thing, allowing us access to our historic pricing, with no additional functionality, doesn't seem like a big give...especially as pricing usually reduces as you scale. So I am very skeptical of this "new pricing" line of reasoning they are trying to pull!
Looking forward to talking to them ~N
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#76Add me to the list of former Segment users. A pricing change made them want to bump our bill from $199 to $10999.
I would explain to them that this was insane. They’d grandfather me in for a quarter. But every quarter I’d get new urgent emails from a new account rep who thought they were going to make a huge score.
We rebuilt event pipes (really not that hard) in house and used stitchdata for pulling from external sources. DIY isn’t without work, but use a hosted Kafka and it’s really not a ton of work. And gives you a ton of flexibility.
I get their niche but I don’t trust their pricing/business further than I can throw them.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#77Add me to the list of former Segment users. A pricing change made them want to bump our bill from $199 to $10999. I would explain to them that this was insane. They’d grandfather me in for a quarter. But every quarter I’d get new urgent emails from a new account rep who thought they were going to make a huge score. We rebuilt event pipes (really not that hard) in house and used stitchdata for pulling from external so…
Oh, link to a description https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-...
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#78Segment 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.
> Took 1 day to rewrite.
did you consider making it Open Source?
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#79I 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…
What was the thing you most liked about this service compared to its competitors. It's the first time I'm hearing about this service and couldn't really understand why people are raving so much about it. To me this looks like YAAS so I guess best ask someone who used it for sometime and paid $79/mo for it.
Re: Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
One of the big benefits of Segment's higher tiers is that you can replay historical data into new tools, which I don't believe is typically possible if you just integrate a new platform directly. Business needs change.