
Stripe Sigma - darwhy
https://stripe.com/sigma
======
exolymph
A couple of people have mentioned that Baremetrics should feel threatened, and
that's where my mind went immediately too. I asked Josh Pigford for his
reaction, and this is what he said:

> We've had beta access to it for a while and have known it was coming.
> Generally not worried about it at all nor do we view it as any sort of
> competition in any sense of the word.

> It doesn't give access to any _new_ data...it's an SQL wrapper on top of
> their API (albeit a very pretty one).

> What we've found over the years is that you really need more data sources to
> make real decisions. So, yes, Stripe has a lot of data, but it only tells
> you part of the story. And that’s the thing here…Stripe’s not trying to
> “tell stories” with the data in Sigma. They’re just giving you a specific
> tool to access the data points.

> Baremetrics, however, _is_ focused on telling the story. We want to help
> businesses know what to _do_ with the data, not just slice and dice it in to
> spreadsheets.

> So, in summary, I think it’s neat but it won’t be anything for us to worry
> about from a competitive standpoint as we’re solving different problems.

That was all on-the-record, obviously, or I wouldn't share it.

~~~
koolba
For established customers maybe not as there's a cost to switching but I'd be
very surprised if this didn't have a hit on their signups going forward (once
it's GA).

~~~
Shpigford
I think you're probably overestimating what Sigma does and underestimating
what Baremetrics does. If anything we've just got a bit more work coming for
us to explain the differences and intricacies of it all. But, I'm not losing
sleep. :)

------
pjungwir
I've only glanced at this, but I love the idea of making your API be SQL. I
did this recently for a company whose customers have a lot of "power users"
who are not professional programmers but use tools like R, Excel, Tableau, or
even Python. The customers are very happy with it! We saved a ton of time not
building a JSON API, which our customers wouldn't be able to use anyway.

Basically we create a customer-specific database whose contents are all
derived from our real OLTP database, and give them read-only access to it. In
our case they also have to be on a VPN, but we've talked about adding a web-
based SQL console like I see here.

It's funny that at first this approach sounds crazy, but really it is what
companies have been doing since the 90s: creating flattened read-only
reporting databases. If you want to do this, you should read Ralph Kimball's
_Data Warehouse Toolkit_ for some inspiration and guidance.

Of course you don't want to give customers access to your OLTP database.
Besides the security and performance problems there, if your core database
becomes a public API, it is frozen and you can never add another feature
again. But a separate reporting database still gives you plenty of flexibility
to grow.

~~~
danudey
My first reaction to seeing an SQL-based API is 'ugh'. SQL is complex and a
little cumbersome, and easy to get wrong.

My second reaction is 'oh, thank god'. I'm so tired of having APIs where I
have to go through the 'get the list of users', 'iterate over the list to
create a map', 'get the list of messages', 'iterate over the list of messages
and add the username to the data structure', 'oh wait I have to get the
channel list separately too, seriously?', 'get the list of channels', 'iterate
over the list to create a map', etc.

I love Slack's API, for example, but having to fetch a list of users, along
with the entirety of their profile data and everything about them, then do the
same for channels, then do the same for messages, then tie everything
together, it's very cumbersome compared to

SELECT m.message, m.when, u.username, u.name, c.name FROM messages m LEFT JOIN
users u ON (m.uid == u.uid) LEFT JOIN (m.cid == c.cid) where c.name ==
"#general" LIMIT 50;

(or whatever it should be, I haven't done SQL in ages)

And I also get a lot fewer records, especially when I'm trying to get the last
50 messages from #general on a Slack instance that has 400 users and 200
channels.

~~~
objclxt
That's one of the problems that GraphQL is intended to solve, specifically you
don't want to write your API queries directly in SQL but you also want the
flexibility to chain queries together and specify the exact types of data you
require.

~~~
nikki93
Wonder what you'd think of a pull + datalog mix, which is what Datomic /
Datascript do: [https://github.com/Datomic/day-of-
datomic/blob/master/tutori...](https://github.com/Datomic/day-of-
datomic/blob/master/tutorial/pull.clj#L102-L115) The neat thing about the
syntax there is that it's a datastructure which if you write a generic visual
editor like
[https://developers.google.com/blockly/](https://developers.google.com/blockly/)
over that only fits puzzle pieces when they satisfy
[https://clojure.org/about/spec](https://clojure.org/about/spec) you could...

~~~
bm1362
For an internal hackathon we basically tried to do this but ran out of time.
We built our own query driven API layer that is basically a shim over datomics
query and pull apis.

------
daxorid
I'm sorry, but I don't grok the utility of this. Can someone "explain this
like I am five"?

We are a fairly long-running Stripe customer, and we mirror all transaction
data, with the exception of actual card info, into our internal dbms. I am
presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well, considering how easy
API integration is. So what is the utility of this service versus querying
internal data - particularly when one can join on data sets that Stripe has no
access to?

~~~
colmmacc
A friend of mine is director of business for
[https://www.franschocolates.com/](https://www.franschocolates.com/) , which
is a great local Seattle family business that has grown up to be big thanks to
a great product (Seriously good chocolate!).

They moved to Stripe for payments years ago, and it's helped them out a lot
with simpler integration and more data. Sigma looks great for them.

They're not a big outfit, they don't have a dedicated engineering3 dept or
developers on staff. Their main business is making chocolate after all.

With Sigma they can more easily query their transaction data and get all sorts
of insight. My friend has degrees in Chemical Engineering and Nutrition, she's
a smart woman and can do a lot more with excel that I can muster. Although she
learned some coding in engineering school, using the APIs directly is a lot to
ask. SQL is much more accessible, and was originally developed for business
professionals just like her. So I expect something like this will help her go
from periodic data imports and excel-based analysis to much more frequent,
maybe daily, reports and analysis.

~~~
genericpseudo
Running a data warehouse is a full-time commitment. Tons of real businesses
have no software engineers.

This is a great-looking product.

~~~
fraserharris
With modern data warehouses like BigQuery & Snowflake, this is no longer true.
We at Fivetran get people setup with a BI tool, warehouse and data pipelines
in a day. From there, its all SQL with little to no management of the
underlying system.

Note: I'm specifically excluding Redshift which requires active management

------
logvol
Is the data freshness a joke? 2 _DAYS_ to get data into the data warehouse?
Stitch, Fivetran, Segment, and more can do way better than that without any
internal hooks.... :/

> Additional processing time–up to 48 hours–is required to make your account’s
> transactional data available in Sigma. This means that it does not reflect
> your account’s most recent data and should be considered a couple days
> behind. The Sigma interface displays the date and time of the last update to
> your data.

~~~
th0raway
I've seen plenty of reporting pipelines that are that slow over the years. If
this was built on the cheap, so it just uses existing pipelines, and instead
of working through streaming, it regenerates the world every night, a 48 max
failure with some is not out of the question once you add some CYA magic. That
would make this pretty cheap to make: Some website work, boxes for queries,
and some security work to make sure data from other customers doesn't leak.

Given how Stripe seems to build products in a lean way, it'd not surprise me
if they are just launching like this and measure customer reaction. If the
main reason it doesn't get the traction they want is the 48 lag, they'll just
rewrite their reporting pipeline to use streaming, and the product gets faster
for free.

------
scrollaway
Really cool! Signed up for the beta, excited to try it.

Although at first glance, it looks quite expensive. Having to pay $10 monthly
outright even with no charges feels kinda bad. I'm a huge fan of Amazon's free
tiers to experiment with; Stripe's test mode is very nice for the same reason.
And on top of this, the pricing being per-charge makes it far more expensive
for businesses selling cheaper products ($5 subscriptions vs. $100
subscriptions).

Compare to Baremetrics' pricing plans which scales based on MRR:
[https://baremetrics.com/pricing](https://baremetrics.com/pricing) \-- At $50k
MRR with $5 charge avg, Baremetrics costs $100/mo, Sigma costs 2.5x that. For
$2.5 avg charge, Sigma costs double, Baremetrics remain the same.

They still sound like very reasonable prices though (and Stripe's fees are
unfriendly to lower price points anyway).

~~~
Swizec
$10/month is two coffees. Not even worth thinking about if you find the
service at all useful.

~~~
pdog
_> $10/month is two coffees._

What?! Where does a single cup of coffee cost five dollars?

For ten dollars, you can brew at least fifty cups of coffee.

~~~
DoubleCribble
I see you are not familiar with Bay Area artisanal pour-overs featuring hand
picked organic berries harvested under a blue moon by Fair Trade certified
farmers (TM).

The (TM) alone adds $0.50 to the price of a cup.

------
georgewfraser
Being able to query your data in SQL is great. But to be really useful, you
need to be able to join many different data sources. For example, if you want
to estimate [cost of sales] / [lifetime value], you need to join your Stripe
data with your Salesforce data. Thats why companies like mine (Fivetran)
exist: to mirror _all_ your data sources in a single SQL warehouse. If you use
a ETL-as-a-service provider and a fully-managed warehouse like BigQuery, it's
really not that hard to set up your own data warehouse that has all your data
in it.

------
neovintage
Interesting offering. I wonder who they're targeting with this and the problem
they're trying to solve.

* Is the expectation that everyone can write SQL?

* If the customer can write SQL and they're sufficiently large, won't they export the data into their own in-house data architectures to use the tools and processes they already have?

* Is data exporting that hard from stripe that they decided to offer a query tool instead?

I'm thinking they're going after the lower end of the customer base, the
customers that may have medium to small transaction volumes. Plus those
customers might not yet have any data warehousing to speak of.

If I was BareMetrics, I would be especially concerned because it will be a
matter of time before Stripe has their own compelling offer that does almost
everything it does and more. There have been other examples of building
businesses around other companies APIs (granted theres always exceptions to
the rule but I want to point out its a huge risk):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512441)

[https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/why-you-shouldnt-build-
a-b...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/why-you-shouldnt-build-a-business-
on-an-api-call/)

~~~
teej
SQL is quickly turning into the new Excel. Most excel power users at our
company have picked up SQL easily. Our product, merchandising, marketing,
finance, and operations have all managed to teach people SQL for everyday use.
This tool is for them.

------
mmanfrin
I get excited whenever Stripe releases a new product because their demo pages
are bar-none the best ever made. The attention to design is very, very nice.

~~~
cocoflunchy
Me too, but I'm disappointed this time...
[http://imgur.com/a/msL4T](http://imgur.com/a/msL4T)

~~~
edwinwee
That doesn't look right. Could you share with me your browser and OS versions?
edwin@stripe.com

~~~
cocoflunchy
It's fixed now, I was on chrome 58.0.3029.113 on iOS.

------
laurencei
> We’ve already written the queries for the most useful reports for different
> types of businesses: From computing MRR to ARPU to analyzing the payment
> methods your customers prefer...

This would have to be worrying for companies like Baremetrics, ChartMogul etc.

Obviously it is not 100% the same - but the ability to quickly get MRR, ARR
etc would solve many peoples main pain.

~~~
toomuchtodo
No one ever learns about the perils of building on someone else's platform.

See: twitter 3rd party devs, Buffer, Facebook app devs, etc

Stripe isn't a payment processor; they are your financial back office as a
platform.

~~~
scrollaway
> _Stripe isn 't a payment processor; they are your financial back office as a
> platform._

Well, they're getting there; Metrics were the #1 missing piece from Stripe, so
it's good to see this. Dealing with EU VAT is still a massive pain though.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Anyone at Stripe know if they have at least some plan to handle EU VAT at some
point? Currently for that you'll have to use 3rd parties like Octobat or
Quaderno. Despite these products are nice, it really feels like something that
should be built-in.

------
ucarion
As usual, another beautiful Stripe product page. Fantastic job! The product
looks pretty awesome too.

In case any Stripe-people are lurking here, the scrolling on the example query
modals (the ones you get from clicking on e.g. "How many active customers do
we have?") is painfully slow -- as though it had only been tested for Mac
touchpads, where scrolling quickly is easy.

I'm on Firefox/Ubuntu, using a shitty USB mouse with a scrollwheel.

P.S.: What demonym does Stripe use? "Striper" is a letter away from an
embarrassing typo.

~~~
ucarion
Answering my own question: a person who works at Stripe is a "Stripe", not a
"Striper".

------
vijucat
I'm not that familiar with Stripe, but my first impression is: why spend time
on creating an inferior Metabase / Periscope / Power BI / Looker /
mariusandra/insights clone? Just allow data export and if you really want to
give a ready-to-use product to your customers, Metabase seems awesome for this
kind of thing?

Stripe could have particular constraints that I'm not aware of, but it seems
to an example of not-invented-here syndrome.

~~~
mygo
maybe in order to help with sales and retention? can't see how it can hurt.

I was making some edits in iMovie last week when I started talking to this
video production professional. He started asking me why I wasn't using
something more powerful like Final Cut and judging me for it. Mind you I was
using final cut at least a decade ago and knew all about its capabilities. But
he failed to realize that for what I needed to do (cut clips and speed up /
slow down segments and add an audio track), iMovie was simple to use and did
everything I needed it to do. Lagom.

I'm willing to bet there are enough people who don't wish to complicate
something simple and add another service to their workflow... and manage yet
another user account... or build out custom dashboards... When all they want
is to answer a simple yet important question like "which customers have not
payed their invoices?"

~~~
vijucat
I get what you're saying. Metabase is quite simple, by the way. I think you're
assuming that all BI tools are heavy. You can get Metabase running in 5
minutes and you wouldn't know it from it's very intuitive GUI, which has it's
limit. It's the iMovie in your iMovie vs. Final Cut analogy.

------
pestkranker
Without any doubts, Stripe is killing it. Great engineering, great design and
great customer support. Shut up and take my money ;)

------
packetized
Perhaps a dumb question, but it's not completely obvious from the demo - is
there an API for this?

~~~
adamballai
Not a dumb question at all! We do not currently have an API for Sigma.
Although, its a great idea and good feedback for the Sigma team. Hope you find
good use of its current incarnation. Thanks!

~~~
cphoover
+1 for this. It would be cool to be able to save the queries and get them from
an API request to feed into some other BI tool... it would almost act as a
saved rdbms "views"

------
johns
This is the reporting interface I wish our product had. I tried out Sigma
during the beta and was very impressed with it, especially the front-end. SQL
is a bold choice but I think the right interface given the structure of Stripe
data.

------
jasongill
Is this going to finally allow us to get the same stats that are shown in the
Stripe dashboard (like "gross volume" for the month)? Stripe has had no way to
get an aggregate of transactions in a timespan - if you wanted to get the
"gross volume" or any other sum or count, you'd have to iterate through every
payment. Not very convenient when you have tens of thousands of transactions
and want to show an up-to-date revenue number on your company dashboard.

------
chrisacky
Technically, how would something like this architecturally be structured?
Curious how they would sandbox the user data and still provide a SQL like
interface.

I wrote something for Doctrine last year where I let my users query their own
data using DQL. I had to write a TONNE of AST walkers to ensure that they
weren't accessing entities they didn't have permissions to. Was a huge issue
that I wish I didn't start :D (But one of those cool things when it was
finished)

~~~
15155
My guess: they implement a SQL parser and executor on top of whatever
infrastructure they have already.

The SQL layer could probably just be an API client to the data they have
already.

------
EGreg
Is here anything out there which

    
    
      * connects to a database
    
      * allows a database admin to write a query once (maybe for $50 a query) against your database
    
      * allows the query to have variables and hints in the code
    
      * visualizes the result set as various types of graphs
    
      * for each variable, lets you set values and ranges and steps etc.
    
      * runs the queries and generates reports
    

I think this could be a good business. If you want to do it together, contact
me: [https://qbix.com/about](https://qbix.com/about)

~~~
hughstephens
I have been pondering something like this for ages, as most solutions seem to
be insanely expensive. Found this though recently fwiw
[http://activereports.grapecity.com/server/](http://activereports.grapecity.com/server/)

------
ram_rar
Pardon my ignorance! Coming from background of building data pipelines. It
seems to me like SQL on backend data. The UI is uber cool. What makes it
different from any rdbms system with UI? am I missing something ?

~~~
adamballai
Great question. Sigma is more than an rdbms, relational database. Sigma is an
application where you can save and share reports with your team without the
need to setup a dedicated ETL pipeline and engineering teams. We curate the
quality of the data for you so you don't have to yourself. Hope that helps!

~~~
scrollaway
> _We curate the quality of the data for you so you don 't have to yourself_

Can you be more specific?

~~~
infinite8s
This is a SQL interface on top of the transactional data Stripe maintains for
their users (based on the orders they process).

------
alexchamberlain
Odd slab pricing model that jumps; are there other SaaS products that do that?

------
tresante
Somewhat unrelated but anyone know what Stripe used to create that video run
through - it looks really slick and would love to discover some tools to make
recording and annotating these kind of videos easy.

------
pitaa
I am consistently impressed by the features Stripe puts out. They always seem
well thought-out and implemented. Usually makes me wish I was still running an
ecommerce site so I could actually use them!

------
danpalmer
This looks great if you're using subscriptions, and put all data you can into
Stripe. For most customers though who a) probably don't use subscriptions, and
b) probably just make simple charges and don't put all the data they can into
Stripe, I can't see much value here.

Certainly for us, ChartIO backed by our own database is far more useful,
particularly as we want to join on account data, preferences, registration
details, NPS data, etc, which is all in our database.

------
klinskyc
As a current ChartMogul customer, 2 questions

1) Is it possible to easy display this data in graphs over time?

2) Can we record non-Stripe billing in it? (some customers will pay by check)

------
codegeek
good to see. I just wrote a simple script literally yesterday to calculate MRR
for my business using their API. It was smooth but I always wondered why
Stripe doesn't improve its out of the box reporting/analytics capabilities.

------
matt4077
I may be a bit dense, but does this include only the data stripe already has,
or could it be enriched with, for example, cost data.

Because the payment process alone just doesn't include enough data to create
relevant analysis for us.

------
dugmartin
@pc do I get a free t-shirt for suggesting the feature 1557 days ago?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172637](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172637)

------
mattbgates
I'm still waiting for the button that clears your test data but leaves your
subscription test plans intact. Guess this feature wouldn't be able to help
with that.

------
j7g
Alation is a more general solution to the data dictionary + shared workbook
problem. Does anyone know if Stripe allows you to export the financial data?

------
JepZ
Anybody else has problems reading the examples on that page? When I click on
an example the source code for the example is rendered very blurry :-/

~~~
brazzledazzle
Do you have a screenshot? The examples I see aren't even images, they're text
that I can select and copy.

~~~
JepZ
Well, it was text here too, but the problem seems to be solved now. Thanks for
looking after the problem :-)

------
chevman
Looks like they are re-building cloud ERP systems, just starting at the
payment transaction and working outward.

Compare to Netsuite and other similar platforms.

------
MichaelBurge
I guess this is useful if you have e.g. a bunch of stripe buttons on a static
website and don't want to set up a database to do analytics.

------
tanilama
The demo is top-notch, impressed.

------
daddykotex
Completely irrelant to Sigma itself, but the landing page crashes FF on a
Galazy S6 :(

------
ssijak
The site freezes my android device and chrome on desktop for 1 minute. :/

------
ThreeFinger
I forgotten the name but i think an similar service exist for analytic data.

------
_untra_
So is this what the old rethinkdb team have been working on at stripe?

------
ensiferum
Your business data at our fingertips ;-)

------
peeyek
Stripe's products is done right.

------
nbevans
Is this based on SQLite?

------
sovande
Oh shiny, but does it blend? I mean, Stripe has a great API, great design and
this, but is Stripe a good payment solution? No, it is not, especially for
sellers. Fraud and charge backs are worse than with PayPal. Despite its many
shortcomings, PayPal has at least a much better fraud protection system. This
is what matters or should matter when choosing a payment solution. Shiny stuff
is great, but if the engine is made with rubber-bands, you won't get very far.

~~~
exhilaration
Stripe provides fraud protection? I thought they were just a (really awesome,
developer-friendly) payment processor and you'd need to put something like
Kount in front of them to do your own fraud protection.

~~~
sovande
Radar, smack there in the left-menu, is Stripe's Fraud "prevention" system.
You can register and mark fraudulent purchases to improve the machine learning
system behind Radar (sure). You can setup rules such as "Block if CVC
verification fails" (really and can be disabled). At least, Stripe is trying
to address the problem. Unfortunately, not with great success at the moment,
but I'm sure/hope it will improve. We use both PayPal and Stripe and the
difference is like a green meadow compared to a green toxic waste dump with
regards to charge backs and fraud.

------
notliketherest
Stripe owns Hackernews. They consistently get their new product offerings to
the front page with huge points. Yes they're loved by the Hackernews community
(and rightly so) but I wonder if their ability to get their stuff to the front
is less to do with it's relevance and more to do with their army of hackernews
accounts with tons of karma. Just a thought.

~~~
matt4077
50 comments / at 100 points probably indicates that there's plenty of interest
in this product.

Always assume good faith... It makes everyone happier, including you.

