

Airbrake acquired by Exceptional - asktell
http://blog.airbrake.io/airbrake-news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake-first-met/

======
benarent
I'm happy to be a part of the new Airbrake + Exceptional team. I'll be heading
up the product, UX and community events . We've already taken huge steps in
improve the exception developer workflow and will be launching much needed
search, notification workflow and integrations to Airbrake in the coming
months. We are going to officially support more languages, and better support
mobile exception tracking.

We are still working out our Exceptional + Airbrake roadmap; but if you have
any questions or concerns please e-mail myself at ben@exceptional.io .

If you prefer Sans Serif, check out the exceptional blog.
[http://blog.exceptional.io/news/how-exceptional-and-
airbrake...](http://blog.exceptional.io/news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake-
first-met/)

On a side note; it's been a pleasure working with the Thoughtbot + Contrast
team.

------
eric35
lately they've just raised the airbrake prices to more than 600% WITHOUT ANY
NOTICE! I see that exceptional cost 9 usd/month (per project or account? it's
not clear) I'll see what they'll do, and eventually migrate to an open
alternative. 5 usd/month for 4 projects is great, 35 usd/month it isn't
(speaking for a bootstrapping startup where every cent can make the
difference)

~~~
benarent
Hi this is Ben. I run all things product. I take full responsibility for
outages and our pricing change and I'd like to share what we're thinking--and
I'm happy to have constructive feedback.

We have regular usage of 3000+ requests per second between our products. We
have 12+ languages/frameworks that feed us exceptions. We also have
integrations with PaaS providers like Heroku, EngineYard, AppFog and others.
We also get hundreds of support requests each week. Part of our mission for
embracing both of these products is to complete a vision that includes many
powerful additions. But to get there we knew we needed to both retool the
architecture for scale. We also wanted to keep under 24 hour turnaround time
for our support.

When you look at our historical pricing there is no way we could meet our
expectations of providing high reliability to our customers, a high quality of
support and maintain all the bits that feed into the product--not to mention
our vision for the future.

We tested our pricing changes with over a hundred of our users and they
adamantly agreed--charge us more--make it rock solid--and let's see some of
those features (e.g. search!).

And in general--our philosophy with pricing is this: we are developers. All of
our customers are developers. But within this group there is a distinction--
the side-project developer and the corporate developer. You are probably a
corporate developer when you've advanced to having a company credit card. To
you, our pricing is trivial for a production infrastructure service (see AWS
or even Salesforce and friends). For the side-project developer--we are never
going to be inexpensive enough. And we don't want to break your back to get
great service from us! In fact, if anyone has been adversely affected by our
plans, you should tell me! I take responsibility and want to hear from you.

I'm ben@airbrake.io or just give me a call at 415 500 5207. Although I'm in
Berlin right now with some of our awesome users
<http://instagr.am/p/GtrfVDlnsy/>, so if my speech is slurred or I'm slow to
respond this evening, you know why. :-)

------
Croaky
More on the acquisition from the thoughtbot blog:
[http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/17212734809/airbrake-
acqui...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/17212734809/airbrake-acquired-by-
exceptional)

------
andrewnez
Errbit (<https://github.com/errbit/errbit>) is the open source alternative to
Airbrake/Hoptoad that provides an identical API so you can continue to use the
same gem in your projects, just point it at a different service.

The problem with being a customer on airbrake/exceptional is that you end up
paying for crappy customers that send millions of exceptions to their servers
putting them under heavy load, if you have a low traffic app then err bit on a
free heroku account is a hassle free way of handling exceptions.

~~~
matthewcford
We host a number of low traffic apps on staging our servers, that would push
us into the $999/month plan. Which is like 2-3 times as much as we pay for the
servers... So for us errbit is worth the time it takes to setup.

------
18pfsmt
Not being aware of Airbrake prior, I assumed it was a service for transcoding
media (i.e. Handbrake in the 'cloud'). Upon learning its actual purpose, it
seems like the project is yet-another-candidate for cloning in an open source
project so people can it run on their own.

As a hobbyist looking to learn more, I have been making a list of services
that I could clone the functionality of, in an open source project, to achieve
that end. This looks like a good opportunity.

~~~
nathan_f77
I'm a core contributor to Errbit, which is exactly this :) -
<https://github.com/errbit/errbit>

We run it at our organization to monitor 11 applications. One of the major
benefits was LDAP authentication, and a custom issue tracker integration.

------
luminousbit
I'm extremely sad to hear about this development. Jon Siegel has a seriously
bad track record of running startups into the ground. I've used both
Exceptional and Hoptoad (Airbrake) extensively, but I had to switch every app
I run to Airbrake because Exceptional has been stagnant for nearly a year.
They obviously don't care about the product and now they'll ruin Airbrake too.
:(

~~~
Kudos
According to Thoughtbot's post, Exceptional has been running Airbrake for
months now.

------
cheald
Sounds like it might be time for me to roll a service like this. I used to use
Exceptional, but their free plan went away, and I switched to just using
exception_notifier to send emails straight to me instead. It's a useful
service, but the price point just doesn't work for hobby/small projects.

~~~
nathan_f77
You might want to check out Errbit, which is a free and open source
alternative that can be set up in minutes. <https://github.com/errbit/errbit>

------
dedene
Is anyone else getting confused too? who did acquired who?

On <http://contrast.ie/> is stated Exceptional is acquired by Airbrake.io
(Hoptoad). And here is state the opposite... will Exceptional continue to
exist or Airbrake? Or Both?

~~~
chriswarren
I believe Exceptional was acquired by Jon Siegel, and then Exceptional, under
its new ownership, acquired Airbrake. I haven't seen anything that indicates
which brand will take precedence or if both will continue running.

------
jerhinesmith
I'm interested to see where this goes next. I feel like Airbrake hasn't gotten
much love lately, and there are multiple times during the day where the
response times are abysmal.

Here's hoping the new stewardship brings some better architecture/hardware and
some new features.

------
meta0
Whoa! The cheapest Airbrake account costs $79! Are there alternatives to
Airbrak & Exceptional?

~~~
snprbob86
Weird... it was $5/mo when we signed up less than a year ago. Seems that our
price hasn't changed. That said, we're moving away from it.

Why? Well, it's practically useless outside of Ruby. The UX assumes
Rack/Rails-isms, so the experience is weird for Javascript errors. Beyond
that, stack traces aren't good enough to debug many issues; you need logging
integration. This is especially true for minified javascript.

~~~
stock_toaster
What are you moving to?

~~~
snprbob86
A mix of syslog, nagios, munin, etc

~~~
nathan_f77
Please also check out Errbit - <https://github.com/errbit/errbit>

If you don't like something about it, I'm always happy to accept pull requests
:)

------
jfeldstein2
How will the acquisition affect the release of the much-needed javascript
exception tracking upgrades?

------
ztravis
Small stylistic comment: the busy background on quotes makes the text very
difficult to read!

------
aneth
Is there a reason to use any of these services given how trivial it is to set
up an open source alternative? You can push errbit to heroku in 5 minutes and
you're done.

Perhaps there is a level of service here and a business I don't see, and I'm a
huge heroku and third party service user, but I don't see the need for a
monthly service fee to aggregate and send exception notifications. It's either
a self deploy or a feature of an overall monitoring service like NewRelic.

~~~
Vitaly
It all depends on how much you value your own time. It never takes just 5 min.
And over the course of a year it migh easily take hour(s) of development time
that is better spent on improving you product.

Heroku does the same thing for example. They are quite expensive if you
compare them to running on raw ec2, but when you factor in the time that you
need to spend to build and maintain your own infrastructure Heroku "suddenly"
looks like a very good deal.

~~~
nathan_f77
Errbit can literally be set up in 5 or 10 minutes. Either on Heroku or on your
own server. And if you are currently using Airbrake in your Rails app, all you
need to do is add one line to your config, and it's done.

That's a great point about Heroku though - there should definitely be an open
source EC2 framework that provides a similar infrastructure...

