[michokest]

As a second-time founder, I found Mixpanel to be the most expensive piece of SaaS we were using in our stack: at barely 30k users, it was already far more expensive than our whole hosting bill combined!

Then I switched solutions for a while, looking for a good combination that'd give me Facebook attribution data plus user behavior. So far, I haven't found my ideas combination and in a way, Amazon doesn't change that.

I find that solutions like segment.io are great in the way that you can install their SDK just once, and have that proxy the events to all other SDKs. For now that's what I chose to do, to avoid week-long delays for approval publishing our apps in the app store.

[alooPotato]

We effectively went through the same thing - moved off of mixpanel when it got too expensive.

We instead started throwing all of our events into Google big query. You can steam events directly into a table or proxy then through your server to add more metadata. You can even use mixpanels great open source client libraries and point them at your servers.

Initially I was worried that we would miss mixpanels built in analysis and tools but we honestly preferred querying a database with SQL better. The tricky queries are the funnels but once you wrote the query once you can just save the template. The only thing we had to build was a chrome extension that could graph the results of an arbitrary query.

[blumkvist]

Thanks for sharing! I'm not a developer, but an analyst. I know SQL fairly well and some javascript, but no coding experience apart from writing code for google analytics. How easy/cheap would it be to build a custom analytics solution like that? It's probably beyond my personal skills, but do you think it's possible for someone with my skillset to find a developer and supervise them? Can you point me to some resources or stories of it being done?

[alexatkeplar]

We recently launched mobile SDKs for iOS and Android at Snowplow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow), so that's probably the easier route to go than a full-blown custom build :-)

[blumkvist]

Yeah seems good and I will check it in depth. It seems not provided out of the box, but I assume I can use MS SQL/HDInsight as a backend, instead of Redshift? Maybe you should consider including Azure as an infrastructure partner. I'm a consultant in the non-valley space (rest of the world). Lots of folks like me are looking for what you've developed. Most are pretty big MS fanboys. Just saying :)

[alexatkeplar]

Great! Yep we're not based in the Valley either. Our first focus is on AWS and Redshift, but yes Azure is interesting too :-)

[alooPotato]

Sorry I forgot to qualify my comment in that I think its a great solution for startups who are comfortable with SQL and a little bit of coding to glue a system together.

For non technical people, Mixpanel def seems like the best product.

[akatz47]

You’re definitely ahead of the game if you’re thinking about using a solution to prevent vendor lock in. The problem though is that running a mobile app is much more than choosing your analytics provider and streaming your data to it. That same stream needs to be used to power marketing activity such as new user acquisition and retargeting to lower acquisition costs and improve engagement.

With mParticle, data portability is a feature within an end to end data platform. So is segmentation with the ability to create any audience you can think of and send it to partners like Facebook, Twitter, Google DFP, AppNexus, ActionX, and many more. Think about seamlessly running an App Install campaign on Facebook to all users that crashed and did not return and then measure it with Kochava or MAT, all with just one client side integration.

Nearly every comment here reflects concerns around cost but cost also includes labor costs, switching and opportunity costs, as well as wasted user acquisition costs. The reality is that you don’t have to send all your data to every third party. You should be able to send a configurable sample of your data to a third party, but also very specifically include or exclude data to reduce costs and protect users privacy.

Disclosure: Co-Founder of mParticle

[sskates]

Segment.io is awesome, would highly recommend. Makes it easy not to be locked into a single platform by lowering the switching cost to almost nothing.

Attribution is a tough problem in itself, most companies either do attribution really well or user behavior really well, but not both. The best analytics setups I've seen are ones where you have a separate attribution platform that feeds data to a user behavior platform.