

10M events a month, free - sb2nov
https://amplitude.com/blog/2015/08/05/the-future-of-analytics/

======
scoot
Well, this was stupidly easy to integrate into a web-app, but my first (and
only) session has consistently been grouped into the 30-60 minute session
length bucket, from the moment the session was born (first event logged) to
ten minutes later.

(The user event stream for the individual user shows the correct session
length though.)

This would make me wary of the rest of the data. Not to mention that all of
the more interesting reports are in the paid plans, which makes 10M free
events that you can't report on of limited value.

Edit: The first event for the first user / session in the "real-time activity
details" has a usage time of "20 min", wheras the first event for the second
user / session starts at 0 seconds, so the bug lies there somewhere, and seems
like it shouldn't have a meaningful impact on statistics for an app in
production with lots of users, but disconcerting for a first-time dev-user of
Amplitude to see bogus values.

~~~
aacook
What questions are you trying to answer about your web-app?

While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they're
not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth.

One of the best charts for doing that is a simple cohort analysis / retention
chart. If you've been storing historical data about your users in your
database or in a log file, one thing you could try is importing historical
data into Amplitude and then looking at your retention chart. I just finished
doing this for a friend in Mixpanel earlier today. Here's the result:
[http://aacook.co/retention.png](http://aacook.co/retention.png)

This chart only uses two user events (Sign Up and some usage event you define)
but tells you so much. Week/week acquisition (number of new users signing up)
is in the first column, new user activation in the 2nd column (number of new
sign ups who reached a moment of value) and a basic form of retention (number
of users coming back at week N).

In my friend's startup, they're doing a great job with new user acquisition
but they have a clear onboarding/activation problem. Less than half of new
sign ups reach the authentic usage state. In the following week, another 50%
of those users drop off.

~~~
scoot
> _While I think reports like individual user streams are neat, I find they
> 're not very good at diagnosing a product and driving growth._

I was only referencing the fact that the individual user data appeared to be
correct in one view, even though the session length distribution chart was
way-off. Had it been off for all users, it would be a big problem, but only
affects the first session (See my edit above).

I agree cohort analysis is useful, but not particularly difficult to capture
and chart on the server side for web apps, or mobile apps with a server back-
end. For SPAs or hybrid or mobile apps you need a facility to capture client
side events, which is where something like Amplitude really adds value.

It's one less thing to build or run, but if it's hamstrung by limited
reporting, free isn't really free - you have to pay to unlock the value of
that event stream.

~~~
aacook
Yeah, it's scary to think a bug could exist in the data when you're making
potentially huge company decisions based on it.

Some of Amplitude's paid reports do look really valuable. Like this one:
[https://amplitude.com/behavioral-cohorts](https://amplitude.com/behavioral-
cohorts)

I've written custom reports like this one and I'd rather not have to write
them again. It looks like some of the reports are in beta. Maybe they'll
release them for free in the future as they work out the kinks.

~~~
sskates
Let me know what you're looking to do and I can see what could make sense!
Send me a note at spenser@amplitude.com

------
Mahn
The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time,
it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a
number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were,
we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the
data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible,
because each respective service always expects you to do things in a certain
way at the end of the day. Which is understandable, because you can't have a
fully featured dashboard right off the bat without an _opinion_ about how
should that work and be presented, so as an analytics provider it isn't an
easy problem to solve unless you go the keen.io route and offer an analytics
as back-end service only.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while services like these are great, I
find that eventually after a certain size startups will almost always need to
have in-house analytics infrastructure to cover all use cases and needs
specific to the business. Not that services like Amplitude don't have their
place, which they do, I just wish there was an universal solution to that
problem. But I suppose you can't help rolling your own infrastructure given
specific enough needs.

~~~
paladin314159
Engineer at Amplitude here. Thanks for your thoughts!

We've been thinking a lot about this exact issue over the last few years and
have come to the same conclusion: when dealing with a platform that provides a
ton of value out of the box, you need to be somewhat opinionated, and you
can't expect to cover every use case. Different customers can have very
different questions about their data and unique insights that they want to
discover.

To address that, we offer direct SQL access to the raw data in Amazon
Redshift. While Redshift isn't the best solution for powering high-
performance, realtime dashboards, its main benefit is that it supports most of
the SQL standard, which means that you can answer close to any question about
the data. This duality of the fast, easy-to-use dashboards that provide
immediate value and the flexibility of Amazon Redshift for deeper, customized
queries has helped a lot of our customers overcome the problems you describe.

Hope this makes sense, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

~~~
efuquen
This is awesome, it's _exactly_ what we have been looking for. Our business
analytics team is very comfortable with SQL and it's been a pain finding any
analytics platform that offers that sort of access to the data. And on top of
that they are super expensive, so we've gone the hosting our own solution with
Redshift route. But our tech team is small and maintaining an analytics
platform has been a distraction so we really want to find a third party hosted
solution that works. Definitely going to check you guys out!

Edit: Also just saw you guys just recently raised a round, congrats!

~~~
durga
We have been using Amplitude at 12 Labs (getapplause.com) after having tried
several analytics platforms, and it's an amazing platform. Large free tier,
really intuitive interface, and the tracking is really accurate (we did
rigorous testing to verify that).

------
nickchmura
What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup
in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to
provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least
savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of
helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing
serious money. For your system to not have a ton of questions during
onboarding and throughout to the average user, would be amazing. Or is this an
expense you plan to eat for now as you grow?

~~~
mathattack
In theory there should be no support for most customers on the free model.
Having a cost with no associated revenue is bad. This is different if you're
looking to bump prices later or get a special reference, but this doesn't seem
to be that kind of case.

The other strategy companies use is "Burn out the support team by starving
them for resources" but I don't like that either.

~~~
sskates
One of the nice things about raising a Series A is it allows us to be more
aggressive in doing things that don't have an immediate ROI- helping out
people who aren't paying us is one of them. We view it as a long term
marketing expense to make future potential paying customers happy.

The other way to attack it is to do things that scale better- for example
better onboarding documentation or hosting webinars.

~~~
shostack
From experience testing Domo, RJ Metrics and Looker (which we ultimately went
with), I know the ETL and modeling piece of integration can be extensive.

I'm curious to what degree you plan on assisting customers with that. While we
have a team dedicated to working on this stuff now, initially one plus that RJ
Metrics had going for them in my mind was that they had unlimited support that
explicitly handled the modeling once we handled the ETL, and had dedicated
analysts on our account.

Now, the obvious tradeoff there is that they don't know our data as well as we
do, and all data has nuances. But for a fledgling company that can't dedicate
manpower to analytics because they need to ship the product, that is a big
game changer.

Ultimately we went with Looker for several other reasons, but that is an
interesting factor to consider with your approach to sales/marketing.

------
scalayer
What's your security story? A search for "security" or "privacy" on your help
docs returns zero results. The privacy policy makes no mention of any
certifications (SOC 2 Type II, Tier 3 SSAE 16, TRUSTe, third-party audits,
etc). How can I trust my data with your service?

~~~
sskates
Here you go: [https://amplitude.com/privacy](https://amplitude.com/privacy)

We're also in the middle of a 3rd party SOC 2 audit right now.

------
sskates
Hi all, founder of Amplitude here. We've always felt volume based pricing to
be bad for analytics culture as it discourages tracking and so are taking as
aggressive of a stance as we can here. Would love HN's feedback!

~~~
nocturne
Oh, hello Spenser-- haven't seen you in years. We went to MIT together.
Congrats on the launch!

~~~
sskates
Hello! Definitely miss MIT. Can't find anything on your profile, who am I
talking with?

------
aet
"Analytics is often the single largest infrastructure expense for a company."
I'm interested in seeing some supporting evidence. Listed references do not
refer to any study or real evidence. This may be true for companies that
entire strategy is analytics or ad-based. (See Deloitte 2014 CIO survey --
lots of companies not even doing analytics or feel they are not spending
enough on analytics.)

~~~
sskates
Sorry, this is mostly anecdotal. I've seen it quite a few times myself. Many
teams that have tried to track their data at full volume on mobile with
existing providers end up paying more for analytics than any other piece of
their stack, and so end up doing things like sampling down their data. Would
love to hear other people's experiences with mobile infrastructure.

------
PabloOsinaga
sskates/et al: This is awesome - we will be trying it. We've built internal
tools very similar to what you guys are doing, so it's great that we have the
option to not do that anymore! Question: I am super tempted at using the free
tier, and just route a sample of users towards Amplitude. After all, using
just a sample is enough to discover patterns, test hypothesis and identify
product-change ideas. While the ~$1000/mo price range could probably make a
lot of sense for us later, right now it's a bit too much. Can I be confident
you won't change the free tier deal in the near future?

~~~
sskates
That's great to hear you're planning to use Amplitude!

I'll personally guarantee that we'll never remove stuff from the current free
plans- in fact we hope to add features to the free plan and increase it's
volume as time goes on. Let me know if you need any other guarantees!

~~~
preetnation
I can vouch for that. Free is great value (though we are now Premium).
Amplitude has been tremendous to use and I can't say enough great things about
it as a customer.

Want Analytics? It's spelled Amplitude.

------
kineticac
We've been struggling with metrics for awhile now. We're hitting all the
"enterprise" plans with our sessions + mau, and just can't afford it. Seems
silly to build and maintain our own metrics, so glad we finally have Amplitude
for all our needs.

The dashboard api is amazing. We only need a few simple numbers, and the API
works fantastic.

Thinks like custom dashboards are cool, but we're able to just grab the
numbers onto our own that we have melded with other services as well.

~~~
sskates
Thanks for the kind words! Hearing that makes me really glad that we decided
to invest in making a solid API so people could roll their own dashboards.

------
shostack
This is great for companies without a lot of data yet. Often times a big
hurdle is the large price tag based on volume, when a company may have no clue
as to their actual volume benchmarks because they haven't gotten as far as
tracking their event data to the level they could/should. So a salesperson
asks how many events they would have, and the response is "how the hell should
I know?"

Your growth discovery engine feature looks pretty cool, as does the event path
report. This looks similar to conversion path reports I've seen in GA's
attribution data.

Unfortunately, a lot of times those reports look nice but don't help much
because they fail to provide meaningful insights when dealing with any sort of
user volume. I've always wanted some sort of zoom out view that lets me view
color-coded patterns or something like that so I can visually get a sense of
what is going on and let my brain's pattern recognition abilities go to work
to spot clusters. This is what in turn informs the questions to feed into your
growth report, since your customers may not know the right questions to ask
yet. Providing tools to give the answers isn't enough, you have to provide
tools that spit out the questions ;)

~~~
sskates
Because we have a huge infrastructure advantage, we try to structure it in a
way where you don't even have to worry about data volume- as long as it's not
killing us on server costs we're fine.

We actually tried to make a fully automated version of growth discovery engine
and customers hated it! To our surprise- people don't trust the result if
Amplitude hands it out on a silver platter. They want control in setting up
the analysis so they know what they're getting out of the system. It's the
same sort of aversion people have towards "magic" in programming. Eventually
as people get more comfortable we'll automate more of it!

~~~
shostack
That is actually shocking about not trusting the results. From the screenshot,
they appear easy enough to verify (although some might require significant
resources to implement/act on).

Out of curiosity, what sorts of things was your initial attempt spitting out
as insights?

Also, as someone likely in your target audience (senior digital
marketing/analytics guy), I have a suggestion for your site that I see lots of
similar businesses fall victim to.

I want to see how the product works without investing time or having a sales
conversation so I can determine if there might be sufficient fit to even
warrant investing more of my extremely limited time.

You have some small screenshots and some marketing text. Consider adding a
full demo account with pre-populated data that people can poke around in
WITHOUT providing an email address. At the very least give me full-screen
images when I click a screenshot. I want to see your interface. I want to see
what data looks like in there, how I can expect to manipulate it, create
reporting views, filter, etc. And again, I want to do all this without being
pestered by a sales person or being added to a list.

The marketer in me is saying "well, maybe consider A/B testing gating such a
demo behind an email capture or more involved signup form", but the other part
of me that gets pestered by sales people for things like this day in and day
out, and really geeks out on this stuff is screaming "just let me see the
F-ing product!"

~~~
alishiu
Sorry I'm just seeing this now -- but we actually do have a full interactive
demo of the product with pre-populated data, just like you suggested! There
are CTAs to try the demo all over the website if you're using it on a
desktop/laptop. Were you looking at the site on mobile?
([https://amplitude.com/](https://amplitude.com/))

~~~
shostack
So that is exactly what I was hoping to see, but the email gate prevented me
from moving forward. I entered "utc@ftc.gov" and it worked though. Nice
product! Wish I could have seen the growth discovery beta in there. Definitely
a different offering than Looker, but still has some nice stuff.

Back to my previous point...are you A/B testing the email gate on demo? You
don't tell me how my email will be used, and my only assumption is that it is
to add me to some drip mailing list I have no interest in, get your newsletter
which I have no interest in, get contacted by a sales person which I have no
interest in at that point, etc. All of that leads to me bouncing without
seeing how awesome your product is.

I obviously recognize I might be in the minority hence my question about
testing, and if the numbers make sense they make sense. Just my $.02 as
someone that would likely be a highly-qualified lead and has seen a million
sites/products like this.

~~~
sskates
Agreed, an email gate is something that we'll be testing a lot in the future.
For now- you can go directly to amplitude.com/demo and you can get around the
email gate. Hope that's helpful!

Also- around the first version of growth discovery engine, it spit out a bunch
of precomputed groups of users with no input and ranked them by which ones
were most correlated with retention. We beta tested it with many of our
existing customers who were looking for functionality like this and they all
didn't like how magical it was. I know, I was surprised too, who doesn't like
automation!

------
vmind
Looks good, just giving a shot at integrating. On the API, it would be great
if your events API would accept a user-agent string, would make generating
events on the server easier, and lighten the JS blob for clients.

------
7cupsoftea
We just migrated over to Amplitude and they've been great to work with. With
another company we were maxing out our # of events pretty regularly. The
solution was to upgrade, but each new tier was significantly more. In a
startup, you want to measure more items, not less, so this model makes a lot
of sense. Varun and Bryan have been great to work with. I'm also pretty
excited to start working with their data science team. Feel free to ask me any
questions. I highly recommend these guys!

------
mw67
Has anyone tried both Mixpanel and Amplitude? What are your recommendations?
We are deciding which one to use for our startup. We are specifically
interested in measuring: 1/ retention (as per Amplitude's video), 2/ usage
patterns on mobile, and 3/ user flows. Thanks

~~~
CanioX
This is a good blog post about how a customer switched from Mixpanel to
Amplitude!

[https://medium.com/@illscience/mixpanel-vs-
amplitude-6b3ba36...](https://medium.com/@illscience/mixpanel-vs-
amplitude-6b3ba36103a0)

~~~
flashman
As a data analyst this is really cool. As a user, it's terrifying to see how
easily I can be tracked and quantified.

------
lexap
Just want to say that we're a very happy Amplitude customer and have been
since early on.

------
gingerlime
This looks neat and the video on the post highlights stuff that we've always
wanted to do with mixpanel, but couldn't really manage that easily. Even
things like copying a query and just changing one parameter is a drag with
mixpanel.

All that being said, the free plan doesn't include all those neat features
like cohort analysis, and the paid plan is way beyond our reach at ~$1k. We're
currently paying around $300 to mixpanel, and that's already maxing out our
small budget. We would love to have a paid plan with less events, but more
functionality at a more affordable price point.

~~~
sskates
You can get started on the free plan with more data and Microscope- which on
it's own many teams have already have found to be a gamechanger. Message me at
spenser@amplitude.com and we can figure out a way to make it compelling.

~~~
gingerlime
thanks Spenser. Dropped you an email. Hope to hear back and figure out a way.

------
zazpowered
This is amazing. Always thought that Mixpanel was overpriced

------
zer00eyz
It always strikes me that data collection and data analysis are tightly
coupled, when it comes to pricing. And then when you look at the tiers that
are available (995 a month really?) it makes even less sense. Yes its cheeper
than me hiring in house to "do it myself" but it still feels like I'm being
taken advantage of.

Here is the reality of how this works. Someone on the business side sees a
shiny dashboard and wants one. The product involved gets pitched over the
fence to engineering, and we go to the site. We know from go that we are
fucked cause the header doesn't mention API/Developer or the words
integration. Because we have a JOB that we probably like we click on help...

Oh look integration docs, Maybe there is hope for this turd!

Wait I'm on zen desk? There are broken pages (there are broken pages)? No
public forms (well at least they aren't apparent).

This tool like the 16 other analytics packages we run, are going to be a flash
in the pan, or so narrowly defined that it will be single use. Im not going to
put anything useful in here, because, well when we hit that cap we will be
asked to "cull data" rather than pay.

Keys to success in this space: Give a shit about the guys implementing your
service. If you can't be bothered to build and run and host your own
documentation I don't know what to say. If your going to send me to a third
party, at least have user forums / public user communication front and center.
Let me know that people are having issues, that your addressing them.

Give me a way to tier out data. Yes you sold my business person on the "free"
tier thats nice. Let me give you the data they are going to want at some
point, let me do it in such a way that you can put it in cold storage till I
need it. Give me a way to back it up to your S3 at cost, or to where I want
(my own S3 my own data storage solution for free). Give me a way to "keep
myself under the cap" by moving the data I want around.

A while later, some business person wants to see "something new" in the
dashboard... Well guess what, we have been collecting that all along, go pay
the vendor get the history and see it in real time. If you can do THAT without
having to involve ME as an engineer then you have a winner on your hands,
otherwise your just analytics implementation 17 and we will move on to 18.

~~~
sskates
Really sorry about issues on Zendesk, thanks for pointing them out! We've
rolled out new docs today and are still ironing out a few bugs. Any pages that
aren't working for you in particular?

Also- totally agreed on there being a lot of other analytics products out
there, which is why we felt the need to be aggressive with giving away so much
data for free.

What do you mean to tier out data? Would love to hear how we could make it
compelling for you.

~~~
zer00eyz
Its not that there are a lot of analytics products out there, its that most
places have a lot of analytics implementations. One of them could do the job,
and probably do it well, yet we keep adding more of them. Lets break down why.

1\. Product person A, adds your product into the stack and pushes RIGHT UP to
the limit you have set. 2\. Product person B needs "some new slice of data"
but guess what... your 12k annual cost is way more than they want to or need
to spend out of their P/L, and their data is going to push the organization
over the cap, so they look at a new product.

1\. Product person A adds in your product to whatever portion of the platform
they are responsible for. it lives in a vacuum there. 2\. Product person B
comes along and lacks awareness or training on how to use your tool. They can
implement another tool, get free training and not have to involved them selves
with product person A.

1\. Product person A adds your product into the stack, the engineers who
implement it find issue with your API/documentation/support. 2\. Product
person B wants to add your product into the mix, and the ENGINEERS say "were
not doing that again find another vendor".

All of the above situations create "fragmented" insights. As an example one of
my employers used Mixpanel for mobile analytics. They were happy with "real
time sales numbers" but the reality of "were not shipping a sub set of those
orders" is where the rubber meets the road. Not only does fragmentation make
it hard to get real insight but it makes it hard to troubleshoot things as
well.

You want my data, take it, but take ALL of it. Don't just take the events I
want to send you, take the logs, take it from mobile and web, take it from the
backend systems, take it from my shippers. Take more than JSON over http, let
me open up a socket and give you the fire hose, give me librarys in Go, java,
php, python, C*. Give me a set of logging tools that gets you that data
quickly. Give engineers a way to send you more context than just the user
(process, session, transaction, response time). Give me a way to tell YOU what
data to keep "hot" and what data to archive... Just take all the data. If you
have it all in one place, your going to make the engineers life easy, the
first time some product person runs up and says "conversions are up on our new
launch" and wants to take credit for the UI changes, and I can lay a graph of
response times over it and say, "well it might be cause the server is faster,
and people aren't walking away" your going to not only have my business but
everyone else I can convince to adopt your product.

------
kdiab
good, analytics has always been overpriced

------
kristineberth
Are you Safe Harbor compliant?

~~~
sskates
Yes! Just got certified a month ago:
[https://amplitude.com/privacy](https://amplitude.com/privacy)

------
claar
The pricing page is unclear; is the $995 business plan per month or per year?

~~~
sskates
Sorry, that's per month, will make that more clear on the page.

------
aembleton
Thanks, I'll add this to a website tonight.

------
curiousjorge
Just signed up. this is good enough that I'm willing to move away from
Mixpanel, I love Mixpanel, but with this type of offering and what seems like
a much more refined UI, I'm sold!

------
edgenet32
So, you moved from volume pricing to limiting features that we can use
instead. heh.

~~~
sskates
Ok I'll bite. Going from volume based pricing to feature based pricing is
standard as an ecosystem matures and the underlying "resource" becomes
commoditized. We offer both more features (Microscope- it's pretty cool,
please check it out!) and more volume on our free plans than similar
competitors so I hope that's compelling enough. Things like enterprise support
and complex features are better put on the paid plans where larger
organizations are happy to pay for them. Long term, the idea is you want to
charge by value, not by cost.

------
gorkemcetin
You know what? 10 million is not cool, but 1 billion is. Nowadays many apps
already can exceed this many API requests. If you go with an open source and
self-hosted solution, then you can have a billion events per month for free,
on a modest Linux server. Have a look at Piwik and Countly for mobile & web
analytics that. Both companies have a lot more on-prem options for a fraction
of price of analytics companies ask for, due to the fact that they build their
pricing on number of servers and not API calls.

~~~
preetnation
10M is cool and Amplitude is an amazing service. Pretty lame the way you're
trying to hijack the thread.

~~~
gorkemcetin
Flurry has been doing that for ages, as well as Google Analytics. What's the
point to announce it like it was never done before, and everybody is ready to
"buy" it like Apple Watch? :)

