Hi HN - we’re Max and Chandler, and we’re building Dittofeed
https://dittofeed.com. We make it easy for growth and marketing teams to message their customers across multiple channels. We're an open source alternative to platforms like Iterable,
http://customer.io/, Braze, and OneSignal. Here’s a short demo video showing how to run the platform locally, and use it to automate a customer onboarding journey:
https://www.loom.com/share/0f7b67170b3a4205add00c22844ca06f
We created Dittofeed to tackle some commonly felt pains with customer engagement platforms:
First, existing platforms make it difficult to keep imported user data accurate and up to date with your primary user datastore. To solve this, we’re building first-class support for importing data from your data warehouse, for better data consistency.
Second, graphical “journey builders” are fragile, and difficult to debug at scale, so we’re building git-based workflows to check your messaging automation into git as configuration, as well the ability to run Dittofeed locally in development, or in CI with our testing sdk, for improved ease of debugging.
Third, companies in industries like finance and healthcare are often forced to implement their own solutions in-house to avoid sharing sensitive PII with third parties. As an open source platform, companies can now self-host us to keep their PII in their network.
Chandler, having worked in marketing for startups, experienced these challenges first hand. Max, on the other hand, was a senior platform infrastructure engineer at Braze, where he witnessed similar challenges from a technical perspective. Our combined experiences sparked the idea for Dittofeed.
We decided to create an open source, developer-focused customer engagement platform, because the often unspoken truth is that maximizing the effectiveness of these tools requires ongoing engineering involvement.
Dittofeed is built on Clickhouse (OLAP store used for storing user events, performing user segmentation, and aggregations) and Postgres (OLTP store for persisting application configuration, and serving user aggregations for efficient single-row reads).
If you can use the following, we’d love it if you checked us out:
Email support via sendgrid (other channels coming soon).
User data import via Segment integration.
We have a cloud offering, and offer paid support. You can find our pricing on our site https://dittofeed.com/pricing.
How to try Dittofeed out:
Check out our demo site to play around with the app https://demo.dittofeed.com/dashboard
Run the app locally via docker compose (https://docs.dittofeed.com/deployment/self-hosted/docker-com...).
Join our slack and we’ll set you up with cloud hosting (https://join.slack.com/t/dittofeed-community/shared_invite/z...)
We’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions, and experiences with these tools. What’s been your experience working with this kind of tech?
I've been in this space for 15+ years now, worked with most of the main players that have on-prem and SaaS solutions, and deployed and run solutions at scale at a few of the largest companies in BigCo land for multiple years now.
I would be cautious on focusing too heavily on the 'developer as the customer' here. Most buying decisions in this space are not made by IT, they are made by CMOs, CXOs, CDOs, etc as that is who owns the budget (and results) tied to this type of solution.
At almost any scale, when you look at total cost of ownership, licensing from one of the main solution providers is usually quite a bit cheaper than building out a whole proprietary stack that one then has to maintain in house via their IT org that likely is not an expert at this kind of stuff.