[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.