[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).

[sskates]

Jeffrey, you undersell yourself! (The best engineers always do...)

Jeffrey's the VP of Engineering at Amplitude who built the core of our current infrastructure.

[shinymark]

Can you say what you charge for SQL access? I have been unsatisfied with 100% of analytics solutions we've tried because of our inability to answer specific questions about how our games are played. SQL or SQL-like query access to the data is something I've wanted for a while.

[alishiu]

Hey, just send an email to [e-mail] - he can chat about SQL access!

[blader]

Have you looked at Amplitude? Because those reasons are exactly why I became a customer (and later an investor)

If you ever get to that point, you can use raw Redshift access to do whatever queries you want. I used to use Zynga's pretty state of the art analytics infrastructure, and Amplitude dashboard was the only thing that covered most of my edge cases. For the rest you can always go raw SQL.

[logicuce]

I think Amplitude gives you access to the RedShift cluster which is hosting your data. You can then connect it to any custom vizualization tool and analyze it to your satisfaction.