

Show HN: Bitdeli - Create custom analytics with Python, share on GitHub - juriga
https://bitdeli.com/

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nodesocket
Looks great. Some feedback:

\+ Setup a live demo (allow users to fiddle with a demo and visualize the
possibilities).

\+ The entry plan of $49 seems a bit steep. Would a $29 plan be financially
possible?

\+ Personally, I am not a fan of trial periods. Either I find value in a
product and am excited or not.

Great work though guys. Where in San Francisco are you located at?

~~~
redguava
Why aren't you a fan of trial periods? I much rather give it a shot before I
commit to paying some money. In fact, I pass on many that don't have trials.

It's easy to talk the talk on a marketing website, a free trial shows the
truth.

~~~
nodesocket
If they had a live demo, why would a trial be necessary? I think either a free
plan or a really awesome demo provides the information and experience needed
for users to make a purchasing decision.

I dislike trials because they require a credit card to even experience the
product. Also, I hate having to remember to cancel before the trial period
ends. The product should be compelling and exciting, and provide enough
details and information that I am willing to pull out a credit card and
commit.

~~~
pc86
I don't believe the trial here requires a credit card until the trial is over
(to continue using the service).

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alexatkeplar
Hey vtuulos, this looks really cool.

We would be interested to explore feeding SnowPlow
(<https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow>) atomic web analytics data into
Bitdeli: potentially our SnowPlow StorageLoader (which currently feeds
Infobright) could fire all SnowPlow events into Bitdeli using your Events API.

A couple of questions about your Events API:

1: does your Events API only support submitting one event at a time? Would be
nice to bulk them up otherwise we're going to be creating 1000s of HTTP
connections.

2: is there a reason why you pull uid up out of the event's JSON envelope, but
not the event type? It's nice to have the event type outside of the envelope,
because then you can know the expected structure of the JSON without having to
look inside it. Just a thought - this is how MixPanel and Fluentd do it, and
it's something we're moving to supporting for SnowPlow.

Anyway, have a think about feeding Bitdeli with SnowPlow event data and let me
know if it's something you want to collaborate on! And keep up the great work
in the meantime.

~~~
vtuulos
Feeding data from SnowPlow to Bitdeli sounds like a great idea.

1\. It does, although it is an undocumented feature. You can send a list of
events instead of a single JSON object to the Events API.

2\. Bitdeli doesn't need an event type but it needs a user identifier. The
event type is utilized with the data sources that provide it, like Mixpanel,
but for instance our integration to the GitHub commits API doesn't expect that
events contain a type.

A good starting point would be to create a super simple card that does
something with the data from SnowPlow, like

[https://github.com/bitdeli/bd-rawevents-event-
volume/blob/ma...](https://github.com/bitdeli/bd-rawevents-event-
volume/blob/master/__main__.py)

that just counts the number of events received over time.

Let me know if you want to give it a try - I am happy to extend your trial as
long as needed.

~~~
alexatkeplar
Great stuff Vtuulos - I have signed up. Will probably take us a few weeks to
get round to it as we have a few other releases which need to happen first...

------
vtuulos
Btw, for more details about what powers Bitdeli, see
<http://weusethat.com/bitdeli/>

The backend is mostly in Erlang. The frontend is made of Backbone, D3,
Bootstrap.

~~~
nkuttler
I assume the backend is not on github? At least I couldn't find it. If that's
the case I find the title misleading as the code that does the analytics work
isn't shared.

~~~
vtuulos
The actual analytics work is done by the Python scripts which are open-source.
See <https://github.com/bitdeli> or sign up to Bitdeli where you can see them
in action.

The backend takes care of the plumbing: receiving and persisting data,
scheduling scripts, managing computation nodes etc.

------
vtuulos
Hi HN! We just (re)launched today. All feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I'm happy to answer any questions here.

~~~
maxel
This is interesting. Would like to explore more for our analytics need.

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vosper
One thing I really like about this is the Python snippets alongside the chart,
right there on the front page. It's unobtrusive but gives me an immediate feel
for how script x could produce chart y.

If these aren't just stylized and you could make them live editable somehow
you'd really be onto something.

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obilgic
I should see live examples, before I sign up...

~~~
zorked
I agree. Anyway, if you sign up you can play with sample data.

It looks completely amazing.

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juriga
Hi fellow hackers, let us know what you think about our relaunch!

Our launch was covered by GigaOM earlier today: [http://gigaom.com/data/how-
bitdeli-thinks-it-can-bring-analy...](http://gigaom.com/data/how-bitdeli-
thinks-it-can-bring-analytics-to-the-people/)

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kmfrk
Grats on launching. Are the graphs rendered with d3.js or something else?

~~~
juriga
Yep, we use D3 for most of our graph widgets (maps, time series, bar charts).
The rest are plain html/css so everything is nice and scalable.

~~~
kmfrk
Sounds great. It really says something about you that your product is able to
stand out amongst all the billion analytics services out there.

It'd be like coming out with the best To-Do or Markdown editor app for iOS. :)

If I could make a suggestion, at some point you should create an analytics
"gizmo" (or whatever you want to call it) gallery similar to
<http://bl.ocks.org/>. You could even just parse the gist examples in Python
and convert them to HTML/CSS/JS yourselves.

It would make it much easier to use and understand what can be done with your
service. Not that I'm saying you aren't planning something like that. You
already seem to encourage a pluggable approach, and what's easier than just
going through a gallery and pressing an "install" button. Suddenly, you don't
have to know any Python.

~~~
juriga
We'll definitely set up a public gallery of all the analytics widgets at some
point. Since all the visualizations are produced by our Python scripts, you
can check our documentation for all the available widget types:

<https://bitdeli.com/docs/python-widgets.html>

You can also see a preview of all our analytics templates on our GitHub
account:

<https://github.com/bitdeli>

When you sign up, you can use any of these analytics scripts with your data
with just a couple of clicks - no coding needed to get started.

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thejosh
$49 is a steep price for checking it out with no additional info.

~~~
vtuulos
Hi! We have a 14 day free trial - no obligation.

Additional information can be best found at our documentation:

<https://bitdeli.com/docs/>

~~~
dirtyaura
Congrats on the relaunch. I also missed the 14-day free trial text, so you
should probably emphasise it more, put it next to sign up buttons etc.

~~~
juriga
Thanks for the feedback! Our data seems to back your suggestion - the signup
button with the extra text is everybody's favorite.

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rfergie
Is Google Analytics on the roadmap?

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vtuulos
Yes, definitely. The biggest issue with importing data from Google Analytics
is that they have a pretty low quota for data export, so it is hard/slow to
get all historical data out from GA.

~~~
rfergie
As far as I know, GA doesn't have the real time stuff in the API yet. So you
only need to update once per day.

When you say "all historical data" do you grab everything back to the
beginning of time? Or does it depend on what dashboard the user has setup?

~~~
vtuulos
With Mixpanel we grab everything back to the beginning of time. How much data
is made available for a dashboard (card) depends on your plan.

See details here:

<https://bitdeli.com/docs/datasources.html>

