7 ms·

Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups

248 points by brackin 8y ago

cornflake 8y ago
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 then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page. It's worth a lot less than that to us.
- theflyingkiwi42 8y ago
  We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane. Took 1 day to rewrite.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    Lambda + S3?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - robbiemitchell 8y ago
    How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?
    - theflyingkiwi42 8y ago
      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.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    > Took 1 day to rewrite. did you consider making it Open Source?
- ivolo 8y ago
  Hey, wanted to say that I really appreciate the feedback and we're releasing this program exactly to address it. This is Ilya, one of the co-founders of Segment. Re: how the program works on the backend — For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised), the Startup Program provides $25k of annual credit (and $50k credit if you're applying thru an accelerator) on the team plan which makes "Segment Free" for 99% of the thousands of startups that use Segment. You can apply for it for multiple years, and after you graduate, we'll provide graduated discounts off our standard plans (50% in year 1). This is designed to be affordable for the entire time that a startup is getting off the ground. Re: value over time — we see companies of 2+ years of age use an average of 7 source types (web, mobile, crm, stripe, ..) and 8 destination types (google analytics, event analytics tool, data warehouse, email marketing tool, A/B testing tool, ..) accounting for 56 point to point integrations. Each source <> destination connection takes an average of 24 hours to do initial API integration and more beyond to maintain, so hours can add up. (https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve/ https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve...) We're also buffering data behind the scenes with Centrifuge when partner APIs have a downtime event to get your data deliverability as high as possible :) (https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/ https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/) Either way — this feedback is super helpful, and if you'd like to chat more I'm ilya@ segment.com. Thanks!
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    > For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised) Basically this definition works for venture-backed startups, who will fail or get big funding in 2 years. For those of us taking a slower, lower-risk path, two years is a pretty short cutoff for "startup" status. If the entry-level, non-startup pricing were more modest, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But reading the comments about pricing here, it seems like the non-startup pricing is very high.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    One of the characteristics I appreciate and look for most about software vendors is clear reasonable pricing. Temporary discounts, negotiated rates, applications, and the like push me away from products and make it much harder to sell what I want up the management chain.
- beater1989 8y ago
  Yes, I completely agree. It just came across as greedy at the end of the day. Especially given their billing model relies on MTU, when 80% of most websites traffic are fly in fly out visitors. It's my favourite technology, but unaffordable for pretty much any company not burning some VCs money.
- koverda 8y ago
  Same thing happened at a company I work at. We got a quote back from Segment, the price was ludicrous, so we rolled our own in a week or so. Increased our Azure bill a bit (500/mo), but still soooooo much cheaper than Segment.
webmobdev 8y ago
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 ...
- lapnitnelav 8y ago
  The value for pure tech players might be low -as in, you could hack something that does 90%+ of what segment does for you. But for every other biz that happens to be on the internet, ie e-commerce, not having to rely on a tech team for implementing various services has some value. If you consider that some websites can only be updated every few months or so, having a third party manage that for you is a life-saver. I've seen / helped too many marketing folks try to get some services (read pixels) implemented and it's always been a Shih-tzuh :)
  - raleigh_user 8y ago
    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)
    - meetbryce 8y ago
      this isn't even relevant. your spam strategy needs work.
      - zizee 8y ago
        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.
quickthrower2 8y ago
They need to define "Startup". What about an established business with a new 'startup'-like product?
- ivolo 8y ago
  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.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    The form assumes you are <2yr/<$5m. So should I email you with details of our company. We are already a customer.
cyberferret 8y ago
We created a Segment account over a year ago, but didn't start using the service because (a) our startup wasn't quite ready, or had the traffic to collect meaningful data, and (b) couldn't afford the pricing at the time. I wonder if we could transition that old account to this new startup plan, as we are still at early stage (just got into our first accelerator a few months ago) and bootstrapped?
- ivolo 8y ago
  Yep, we can get you in :) Apply at segment.com/startups and send me an email: ilya @segment.com. Thanks!
lapnitnelav 8y ago
Ah damn, signed up for segment one week ago or so. Some you win, some you lose I guess. Echoing other commenters, pricing plans are quite steep for the more modest businesses out there who might have a pretty large reach (Monthly users) but nowhere near the budget to shell out big $$. Tis a shame cause as someone with a foot in tech and the other one in marketing, I know there's a lof value for the real world businesses out there (outside of the tech bubble) but having to spend what I guess is a hefty amount of cash every month just for the pipes is going to be a hard sell for folks which might be already struggling to see value in investing in technology.
- ivolo 8y ago
  It's okay if you signed up one week ago. Email ilya @segment.com with the details and we'll get something good going!
  - lapnitnelav 8y ago
    Will do, cheers. Been following you guys for a while, cool to see you're expanding -esp here in good auld Dublin and having enough momentum to afford such a move.
harrisonjackson 8y ago
The form won't accept 0 in the total funding raised input. MacOS/Chrome
- ivolo 8y ago
  Hahah, woops we're on it!
rexreed 8y ago
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?
- idunno246 8y ago
  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 once, so you don't hit as many 'oops we forgot/implemented wrong conversion tracking for Random Service X' None of it is that hard to do, but there's probably better things your engineer should be doing. Also, as the engineer whose done it, on the tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team.
  - IMTDb 8y ago
    You are describing google tag manager, not segment.
    - idunno246 8y ago
      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-difference-between-segment-and-tag-managers/ 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."
  - Zaheer 8y ago
    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?
beater1989 8y ago
Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.
elbac 8y ago
Data volume-based pricing is a bit out of control across most analytics/data products. My company has been moving away from volume-based pricing to a feature/value-based model. The big challenge is aligning data scale to company size/price. I suspect Segment is trying to solve for this very problem with their price increases but at the expense of smaller business. The 'startup' program is a great way for them to keep the platform accessible to new businesses. I applaud them for that. -- Shameless plug: My company Indicative (https://www.indicative.com https://www.indicative.com), a customer/behavioral analytics platform that integrates with Segment. We offer 1 billion events/user actions a month for free for Segment users, so that all companies, especially startups can start using data in bringing their products to market and without having to worry about data limits.
- joering2 8y ago
  Your product looks great, is related to OP, and your post clearly indicates you are advertising. Good old Hacker News from circa 5-6 years ago would applaud you. Today?? Shame on all those who voted you down.
  - elbac 8y ago
    :) thanks.
nlh 8y ago
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 wonderful adjunct part of my analytics stack (and maybe my bill went up to $200 or so when they added that.) Then they changed their pricing so that bill became $1200 (per month!). Total insanity. When I did some consulting work for another startup that had even higher traffic numbers (150k-200k uniques) but was also very lightly monetized, I actually lost some serious political capital with the CEO when he saw the Segment price quote of nearly $2000 per month. He thought I was trying to fleece them. Sorry guys. I think you’ve built a REALLY awesome product and I / similarly small businesses are clearly not the target demographic anymore, and I’m sure you’re now making metric boatloads of money from big enterprise customers who don’t care about a $20k annual bill for analytics, but man, it’s disappointing to be so priced out of what was once a great part of my toolkit.
- ivolo 8y ago
  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
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Since you’re here, I highly agree. Segment is awesome and I’d love to pay for it but I need to track entire lifecycle for customers, including their original acquisition. That means tracking anonymous web visitors, and that immediately puts Segment into the “whoa, it’s how much?!?” category for me.
  - nlh 8y ago
    Very cool of you to be active on this Ilya! Happy to chat - I'll drop you a line.
  - 8y ago
rm999 8y ago
I've used Segment at two companies in a row (in both cases they were implemented at early stages before I joined). It's a good product with broken pricing. They charge insane amounts of money for add-ons and seem to get exponentially more expensive as you grow. My recent renegotiation with them was the most painful experience with a vendor in my 12 year career. I want to like Segment, I really do. But until they change their attitude I strongly recommend against using them. Especially for startups, because it's not easy to get off once you deeply integrate Segment into your stack.
- ivolo 8y ago
  Thanks for your feedback, "painful" is not what I like to hear. If you're willing, will you send me an email ilya @segment.com, would love to get details.
- jameane 8y ago
  Had a very similar experience at a previous company as well. At the end of the renewal meeting, we left with no indication our issues would get solved and a quote for a 4X price increase. We churned.
amanzi 8y ago
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.
jto1218 8y ago
clicked on the link to read this, apparently my pi hole has the domain blocked
- elitistphoenix 8y ago
  Same. Seems like they've employed bots to upvote.
woodhull 8y ago
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.
i386 8y ago
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.
xenospn 8y ago
Oh Nice! I’ve been waiting for that.
robbiemitchell 8y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
lars_francke 8y ago
I'm having trouble understanding what the use-case for Segment is. Mind you: I work in a pretty unrelated field and almost never deal with the frontend/web stack. What would I use it for?
- thekhatribharat 8y ago
  A typical web analytics pipeline involves collecting web data (events like visits, clicks, sign-ups, logins, purchases, email opens, email clicks, website chat sessions, etc.), collating that data and loading the collated data into a data warehouse - we may think of it as the first-mile ETL :) The web analytics SaaS market is diverse and fragmented and each of those event types (mentioned earlier) is usually recorded via a different SaaS tool. This is where Segment comes in. It provides a unified interface for collection and collation of web data across a wide variety of web analytics tools - Google Ads, Intercom, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc. and makes this process extremely easy.
jordinl 8y ago
I remember a few years ago I was working for a company that wanted to build a Segment clone, just a clone without any different functionality, with hopes they would raise money. Even when I asked how a feature should be implemented, instead of showing me some designs, all they would do was open up Segment and show me the feature... Suffice to say, the project failed and I wasn't surprised nor sad.
- courtz 8y ago
  Im not surprised though - the cost is prohibitive. And even if they provide a free tool for 2 years, what kind of bill do you expect. I believe this market is ripe for disruption. A clone, very differentiated by focus would certainly eat away and bring more aligned pricing. Right now, Segment are literally the only folks who do what they do. They do it well, but its not affordable to bootstrapped startups.
davidbhead 8y ago
This is awesome. Segment has always been a tool that speeds up our experimentation dramatically but the cost has been tough to swallow. I’m grateful your team has built this new program!
Pristina 8y ago
Back when I was in school there's this guy who sold meth. First hit was free.
cheerioty 8y ago
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!!"
buremba 8y ago
Segment 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/ https://rakam.io/integration/segment/
- thekhatribharat 8y ago
  > 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. The reason Segment doesn't have a user interface for insights is because it has destinations. There's a slew of BI tools you can choose from the catalog as destinations, including Mixpanel.
  - buremba 8y ago
    If you're using Segment for Mixpanel or other end-to-end analytics providers, that's OK but IMO the real benefit of using Segment is being able to collect all your company data including customer event data, marketing, and CRM into your data-warehouse so that you have the big picture of all your company data. Our solution basically provides Mixpanel-like interface for your Segment Warehouse Data (See https://segment.com/product/warehouses/ https://segment.com/product/warehouses/) and you have the ability to see all your company data, unlike Mixpanel. You can always use generic BI solutions to analyze the data collected by Segment but the product data has different semantics and Mixpanel-like solutions help the product teams to be able to ask more ad-hoc questions without any need of help from the data team.
noahmbarr 8y ago
This 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
jdwyah 8y ago
Add 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.
- jdwyah 8y ago
  Oh, link to a description https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-ezcater-part-1-event-taxonomy-warehousing https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-...

248 points by brackin 8y ago

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 then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page. It's worth a lot less than that to us.

theflyingkiwi42 8y ago
We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane. Took 1 day to rewrite.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Lambda + S3?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- robbiemitchell 8y ago
  How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?
  - theflyingkiwi42 8y ago
    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.
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  > Took 1 day to rewrite. did you consider making it Open Source?
ivolo 8y ago
Hey, wanted to say that I really appreciate the feedback and we're releasing this program exactly to address it. This is Ilya, one of the co-founders of Segment. Re: how the program works on the backend — For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised), the Startup Program provides $25k of annual credit (and $50k credit if you're applying thru an accelerator) on the team plan which makes "Segment Free" for 99% of the thousands of startups that use Segment. You can apply for it for multiple years, and after you graduate, we'll provide graduated discounts off our standard plans (50% in year 1). This is designed to be affordable for the entire time that a startup is getting off the ground. Re: value over time — we see companies of 2+ years of age use an average of 7 source types (web, mobile, crm, stripe, ..) and 8 destination types (google analytics, event analytics tool, data warehouse, email marketing tool, A/B testing tool, ..) accounting for 56 point to point integrations. Each source <> destination connection takes an average of 24 hours to do initial API integration and more beyond to maintain, so hours can add up. (https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve/ https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve...) We're also buffering data behind the scenes with Centrifuge when partner APIs have a downtime event to get your data deliverability as high as possible :) (https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/ https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/) Either way — this feedback is super helpful, and if you'd like to chat more I'm ilya@ segment.com. Thanks!
- gnicholas 8y ago
  > For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised) Basically this definition works for venture-backed startups, who will fail or get big funding in 2 years. For those of us taking a slower, lower-risk path, two years is a pretty short cutoff for "startup" status. If the entry-level, non-startup pricing were more modest, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But reading the comments about pricing here, it seems like the non-startup pricing is very high.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  One of the characteristics I appreciate and look for most about software vendors is clear reasonable pricing. Temporary discounts, negotiated rates, applications, and the like push me away from products and make it much harder to sell what I want up the management chain.
beater1989 8y ago
Yes, I completely agree. It just came across as greedy at the end of the day. Especially given their billing model relies on MTU, when 80% of most websites traffic are fly in fly out visitors. It's my favourite technology, but unaffordable for pretty much any company not burning some VCs money.
koverda 8y ago
Same thing happened at a company I work at. We got a quote back from Segment, the price was ludicrous, so we rolled our own in a week or so. Increased our Azure bill a bit (500/mo), but still soooooo much cheaper than Segment.

webmobdev 8y ago

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 ...

lapnitnelav 8y ago
The value for pure tech players might be low -as in, you could hack something that does 90%+ of what segment does for you. But for every other biz that happens to be on the internet, ie e-commerce, not having to rely on a tech team for implementing various services has some value. If you consider that some websites can only be updated every few months or so, having a third party manage that for you is a life-saver. I've seen / helped too many marketing folks try to get some services (read pixels) implemented and it's always been a Shih-tzuh :)
- raleigh_user 8y ago
  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)
  - meetbryce 8y ago
    this isn't even relevant. your spam strategy needs work.
    - zizee 8y ago
      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.

quickthrower2 8y ago

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

ivolo 8y ago
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.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  The form assumes you are <2yr/<$5m. So should I email you with details of our company. We are already a customer.

cyberferret 8y ago

We created a Segment account over a year ago, but didn't start using the service because (a) our startup wasn't quite ready, or had the traffic to collect meaningful data, and (b) couldn't afford the pricing at the time. I wonder if we could transition that old account to this new startup plan, as we are still at early stage (just got into our first accelerator a few months ago) and bootstrapped?

ivolo 8y ago
Yep, we can get you in :) Apply at segment.com/startups and send me an email: ilya @segment.com. Thanks!

lapnitnelav 8y ago

Ah damn, signed up for segment one week ago or so. Some you win, some you lose I guess. Echoing other commenters, pricing plans are quite steep for the more modest businesses out there who might have a pretty large reach (Monthly users) but nowhere near the budget to shell out big $$. Tis a shame cause as someone with a foot in tech and the other one in marketing, I know there's a lof value for the real world businesses out there (outside of the tech bubble) but having to spend what I guess is a hefty amount of cash every month just for the pipes is going to be a hard sell for folks which might be already struggling to see value in investing in technology.

ivolo 8y ago
It's okay if you signed up one week ago. Email ilya @segment.com with the details and we'll get something good going!
- lapnitnelav 8y ago
  Will do, cheers. Been following you guys for a while, cool to see you're expanding -esp here in good auld Dublin and having enough momentum to afford such a move.

harrisonjackson 8y ago

The form won't accept 0 in the total funding raised input. MacOS/Chrome

ivolo 8y ago
Hahah, woops we're on it!

rexreed 8y ago

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?

idunno246 8y ago
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 once, so you don't hit as many 'oops we forgot/implemented wrong conversion tracking for Random Service X' None of it is that hard to do, but there's probably better things your engineer should be doing. Also, as the engineer whose done it, on the tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team.
- IMTDb 8y ago
  You are describing google tag manager, not segment.
  - idunno246 8y ago
    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-difference-between-segment-and-tag-managers/ 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."
- Zaheer 8y ago
  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?

beater1989 8y ago

Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.

elbac 8y ago

Data volume-based pricing is a bit out of control across most analytics/data products. My company has been moving away from volume-based pricing to a feature/value-based model. The big challenge is aligning data scale to company size/price. I suspect Segment is trying to solve for this very problem with their price increases but at the expense of smaller business. The 'startup' program is a great way for them to keep the platform accessible to new businesses. I applaud them for that. -- Shameless plug: My company Indicative (https://www.indicative.com https://www.indicative.com), a customer/behavioral analytics platform that integrates with Segment. We offer 1 billion events/user actions a month for free for Segment users, so that all companies, especially startups can start using data in bringing their products to market and without having to worry about data limits.

joering2 8y ago
Your product looks great, is related to OP, and your post clearly indicates you are advertising. Good old Hacker News from circa 5-6 years ago would applaud you. Today?? Shame on all those who voted you down.
- elbac 8y ago
  :) thanks.

nlh 8y ago

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 wonderful adjunct part of my analytics stack (and maybe my bill went up to $200 or so when they added that.) Then they changed their pricing so that bill became $1200 (per month!). Total insanity. When I did some consulting work for another startup that had even higher traffic numbers (150k-200k uniques) but was also very lightly monetized, I actually lost some serious political capital with the CEO when he saw the Segment price quote of nearly $2000 per month. He thought I was trying to fleece them. Sorry guys. I think you’ve built a REALLY awesome product and I / similarly small businesses are clearly not the target demographic anymore, and I’m sure you’re now making metric boatloads of money from big enterprise customers who don’t care about a $20k annual bill for analytics, but man, it’s disappointing to be so priced out of what was once a great part of my toolkit.

ivolo 8y ago
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
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Since you’re here, I highly agree. Segment is awesome and I’d love to pay for it but I need to track entire lifecycle for customers, including their original acquisition. That means tracking anonymous web visitors, and that immediately puts Segment into the “whoa, it’s how much?!?” category for me.
- nlh 8y ago
  Very cool of you to be active on this Ilya! Happy to chat - I'll drop you a line.
- 8y ago

rm999 8y ago

I've used Segment at two companies in a row (in both cases they were implemented at early stages before I joined). It's a good product with broken pricing. They charge insane amounts of money for add-ons and seem to get exponentially more expensive as you grow. My recent renegotiation with them was the most painful experience with a vendor in my 12 year career. I want to like Segment, I really do. But until they change their attitude I strongly recommend against using them. Especially for startups, because it's not easy to get off once you deeply integrate Segment into your stack.

ivolo 8y ago
Thanks for your feedback, "painful" is not what I like to hear. If you're willing, will you send me an email ilya @segment.com, would love to get details.
jameane 8y ago
Had a very similar experience at a previous company as well. At the end of the renewal meeting, we left with no indication our issues would get solved and a quote for a 4X price increase. We churned.

amanzi 8y ago

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.

jto1218 8y ago

clicked on the link to read this, apparently my pi hole has the domain blocked

elitistphoenix 8y ago
Same. Seems like they've employed bots to upvote.

woodhull 8y ago

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.

i386 8y ago

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.

xenospn 8y ago

Oh Nice! I’ve been waiting for that.

robbiemitchell 8y ago

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

lars_francke 8y ago

I'm having trouble understanding what the use-case for Segment is. Mind you: I work in a pretty unrelated field and almost never deal with the frontend/web stack. What would I use it for?

thekhatribharat 8y ago
A typical web analytics pipeline involves collecting web data (events like visits, clicks, sign-ups, logins, purchases, email opens, email clicks, website chat sessions, etc.), collating that data and loading the collated data into a data warehouse - we may think of it as the first-mile ETL :) The web analytics SaaS market is diverse and fragmented and each of those event types (mentioned earlier) is usually recorded via a different SaaS tool. This is where Segment comes in. It provides a unified interface for collection and collation of web data across a wide variety of web analytics tools - Google Ads, Intercom, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc. and makes this process extremely easy.

jordinl 8y ago

I remember a few years ago I was working for a company that wanted to build a Segment clone, just a clone without any different functionality, with hopes they would raise money. Even when I asked how a feature should be implemented, instead of showing me some designs, all they would do was open up Segment and show me the feature... Suffice to say, the project failed and I wasn't surprised nor sad.

courtz 8y ago
Im not surprised though - the cost is prohibitive. And even if they provide a free tool for 2 years, what kind of bill do you expect. I believe this market is ripe for disruption. A clone, very differentiated by focus would certainly eat away and bring more aligned pricing. Right now, Segment are literally the only folks who do what they do. They do it well, but its not affordable to bootstrapped startups.

davidbhead 8y ago

This is awesome. Segment has always been a tool that speeds up our experimentation dramatically but the cost has been tough to swallow. I’m grateful your team has built this new program!

Pristina 8y ago

Back when I was in school there's this guy who sold meth. First hit was free.

cheerioty 8y ago

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!!"

buremba 8y ago

Segment 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/ https://rakam.io/integration/segment/

thekhatribharat 8y ago
> 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. The reason Segment doesn't have a user interface for insights is because it has destinations. There's a slew of BI tools you can choose from the catalog as destinations, including Mixpanel.
- buremba 8y ago
  If you're using Segment for Mixpanel or other end-to-end analytics providers, that's OK but IMO the real benefit of using Segment is being able to collect all your company data including customer event data, marketing, and CRM into your data-warehouse so that you have the big picture of all your company data. Our solution basically provides Mixpanel-like interface for your Segment Warehouse Data (See https://segment.com/product/warehouses/ https://segment.com/product/warehouses/) and you have the ability to see all your company data, unlike Mixpanel. You can always use generic BI solutions to analyze the data collected by Segment but the product data has different semantics and Mixpanel-like solutions help the product teams to be able to ask more ad-hoc questions without any need of help from the data team.

noahmbarr 8y ago

This 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

jdwyah 8y ago

Add 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.

jdwyah 8y ago
Oh, link to a description https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-ezcater-part-1-event-taxonomy-warehousing https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-...