
Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups - brackin
https://segment.com/startups/
======
nlh
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
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

~~~
buf
I'm in the same boat. I love love love segment at Reforge (and I hear Segment
loves Reforge, too). I've built some pretty awesome data pipelines (Personas
are my favorite feature of all time) and have armed the marketing team to the
teeth.

But my side project, Casting Call Club, has 150k uniques a month, most of
which are not monetized. There's just simply no way I can justify paying for
Segment. Many of the ideas I think about are simply lost because it would take
too much time to build out myself.

~~~
RonanTheGrey
We get almost 500,000 uniques a month, mostly unmonetized (though that's
changing, slowly). I would LOVE to integrate an enterprise tracker but the
pricing is just absurd. I mean, there's no way we can even 'try' it. We grew
alot faster in organic traffic than we expected.

It's definitely meant for large enterprises, not for growing ones.

------
cornflake
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
We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely
insane.

Took 1 day to rewrite.

~~~
robbiemitchell
How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web
traffic?

~~~
theflyingkiwi42
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.

------
robbiemitchell
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)

------
rm999
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.

~~~
jameane
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.

------
webmobdev
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 ...

~~~
nicodjimenez
Agreed.

I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble
than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's +
timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business
you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something
unique then you're better off building your own analytics.

Also, realistically most businesses are built on top of databases. So the most
important stuff is in the databases anyway. So might as well just put metrics
in SQL too.

~~~
heliodor
Self-hosting your analytics is probably the better way to go. There's Piwik
(name has changed to Matomo at some point) and I noticed Countly also has an
open-source version your can host yourself. There's a lot of functionality in
analytics software and you should not throw it all away and roll your own
simplistic thing when you can just take a quality open-source product and host
it yourself.

But I agree that applications have unique things about them and for those,
people need to implement their own metrics to measure whatever interests them.
In that case, the current best choices for time-series database are InfluxDB
and Prometheus. They provide very simple APIs and tools for collecting and
transmitting metrics, and if you prefer to store aggregations of your metrics
instead of the many individual data points, you can use the very simple but
powerful StatsD api/client/library/package.

Shameless plug: My company HostedMetrics
([https://HostedMetrics.com](https://HostedMetrics.com)) offers hosted and
fully managed InfluxDB and Prometheus. It includes everything needed for a
turnkey metrics platform that is ready to accept your metrics the moment you
create an account: StatsD for data transmission, Grafana for dashboards, and
the alerting functionalities of InfluxDB/Prometheus.

------
elbac
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
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
:) thanks.

------
noahmbarr
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

------
amanzi
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.

------
jdwyah
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
Oh, link to a description [https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-
testing-at-...](https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at-
ezcater-part-1-event-taxonomy-warehousing)

------
rexreed
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
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.

~~~
Zaheer
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?

~~~
wastedhours
>> 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.

------
lapnitnelav
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
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
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.

------
i386
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.

------
beater1989
Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.

------
jordinl
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
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.

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

------
buremba
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
> _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
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.

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

~~~
ivolo
Hahah, woops we're on it!

------
jto1218
clicked on the link to read this, apparently my pi hole has the domain blocked

~~~
elitistphoenix
Same. Seems like they've employed bots to upvote.

------
davidbhead
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!

------
woodhull
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.

------
lars_francke
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
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.

------
cheerioty
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!!"

------
quickthrower2
They need to define "Startup". What about an established business with a new
'startup'-like product?

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

------
xenospn
Oh Nice! I’ve been waiting for that.

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

