[webmobdev]

If you run a business, I really don't understand the appeal of sharing a crucial part of your data (for web based applications / services) with a third-party (Google, Amazon etc. or maybe even Segments in the future) that may at some point compete with you ... especially when you can just parse your own web logs ...

[jasonkester]

Yes, it’s possible to have your engineering team build its own version of Mixpanel. And it may actually cost you less than it cost Mixpanel to build Mixpanel because it’s more focused on your needs.

But you know who has already built Mixpanel? Mixpanel. And they’ll let your business use if for a couple hundred dollars a month. Starting today, not six months from now when your version would be finished.

Better still, if you use Mixpanel’s Mixpanel instead of the one you built yourself, you can have your dev team develop your product during all that time they would have otherwise been building somebody else’s product for internal use.

Build versus buy. It’s a thing for a reason.

[webmobdev]

> Starting today, not six months from now when your version would be finished.

The raw data is with you. You don't need to wait for 6 months but launch a version with limited features and can continue developing it slowly, until it achieves whatever feature parity you are aiming for.

[nicodjimenez]

Agreed.

I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's + timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something unique then you're better off building your own analytics.

Also, realistically most businesses are built on top of databases. So the most important stuff is in the databases anyway. So might as well just put metrics in SQL too.

[heliodor]

Self-hosting your analytics is probably the better way to go. There's Piwik (name has changed to Matomo at some point) and I noticed Countly also has an open-source version your can host yourself. There's a lot of functionality in analytics software and you should not throw it all away and roll your own simplistic thing when you can just take a quality open-source product and host it yourself.

But I agree that applications have unique things about them and for those, people need to implement their own metrics to measure whatever interests them. In that case, the current best choices for time-series database are InfluxDB and Prometheus. They provide very simple APIs and tools for collecting and transmitting metrics, and if you prefer to store aggregations of your metrics instead of the many individual data points, you can use the very simple but powerful StatsD api/client/library/package.

Shameless plug: My company HostedMetrics (https://HostedMetrics.com) offers hosted and fully managed InfluxDB and Prometheus. It includes everything needed for a turnkey metrics platform that is ready to accept your metrics the moment you create an account: StatsD for data transmission, Grafana for dashboards, and the alerting functionalities of InfluxDB/Prometheus.

[jjeaff]

I am working on rolling out everything on k8s for this reason. I know the conventional wisdom of startups is to just pay for services and move on, but I found that we just keep running into walls of either expense or the need to customize stuff. By the time we learn how to use someone's proprietary setup and get it all integrated, we could have just spun up a container in our cluster to handle it. GKE and a couple lines of kubectl and helm are pretty powerful these days.

[lapnitnelav]

The value for pure tech players might be low -as in, you could hack something that does 90%+ of what segment does for you.

But for every other biz that happens to be on the internet, ie e-commerce, not having to rely on a tech team for implementing various services has some value. If you consider that some websites can only be updated every few months or so, having a third party manage that for you is a life-saver.

I've seen / helped too many marketing folks try to get some services (read pixels) implemented and it's always been a Shih-tzuh :)

[raleigh_user]

One product worth checking out might be simpleanalytics.io. its a small company that doesn't track your data. And its cheap. Not entirely sure of your use case but ive seen a good amount of people saying screw the data collectors Ill roll my own and it seems some of what you might be looking for is available from simple (I have no affiliation, just appreciate alternatives to the huge tech companies)

[ec109685]

Is there any examples of startups that have failed due to their use of Google Analytics and google competing with them?