[JimmyL]

I recently tried Keen.io for a project I'm working on, and it didn't work out - the metrics I was looking for were too complex (eg. the average lag between signup and the third time a user does a particular action) to do natively, and the suggestions for how to get that working in Keen (doing some calculations on the event data before sending out) I wasn't interested in.

Having said that, the guys at Keen were great to work with as I was sorting this out. The email I sent to their generic "contact us" address with some data modelling questions was answered promptly by one of the founders with solutions which, while I didn't like them, were interesting and would have worked out. They were also generous in letting me crash through the initial free quota while I was figuring out if the thing worked out for my use.

So while I didn't sign up as a paying customer with them (and I've stopped sending them events), it was among the most pleasant interactions I've had with a prospective analytics vendor in a long while - well done guys!

[dorkitude]

I'm glad you had a pleasant experience -- it's too bad it didn't work out.

You may be interested in an upcoming feature we currently have in private beta, which does this:

    your events  ---->  Keen IO  ---->  your S3 bucket on AWS

We have a great, standard format for representing the events in files in S3. If you were using that feature, you could just write an Elastic MapReduce job to perform these sorts of custom calculations (we'll be open-sourcing a bunch of these sorts of scripts). Another option would be to pay one of our partners to write this analysis code for you.

I wonder: would that feature be interesting to you? Would it have perhaps allowed us to win your business?

[JimmyL]

I'm not sure it would have (without trying it), but it certainly would have kept you in the game for a bit longer since I'm a-OK with EMR jobs for my analysis (or presumably being able to download those files and load them into my own Hadoop cluster).