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!
Game developer here, currently deciding between you guys and Mixpanel. Could you offer pros/cons to each platform? We are looking to create a bunch of custom dashboards for in-game activity.
But isn't volume-based pricing a good approximation of cost-based pricing? With the new setup, are low-volume customers paying extra to subsidize high-volume customers?
We offer Redshift and raw SQL access as an add-on to the analytics, it's not used to power the dashboards at all.
We've actually developed an in house backend from scratch that's gone through ~10 or so iterations. There are 3 main data stores:
1) We have a real-time in memory data store (similar to Redis) for recent data that aggregates data in various ways to display on the dashboard 2) We have a batch service backed by Amazon S3 that for data older than 24 hours that also aggregates data 3) We have a column store for more complex queries that can't be represented by the aggregated data
On top of all that we have a distributed query engine that access all the data stores and queries the appropriate ones in parallel at query time on the dashboards.
We'll have a blog post that has more details about our stack in the next week or so.