Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

As one of those free MixPanel users - their non-free plan is just too expensive.

I eventually stopped using MixPanel altogether. In a choice between "only get a small subset of data" and "get all the data, but super super expensively", I decided I just don't care enough and opted for no data. Or rather, the combination of gAnalytics and a few others is Good Enough (tm).

View on HN

I had the same experience, and I have to say that I'm torn in that I can see both sides. MixPanel doesn't want to screw around with $10 or $20/month plans, but I have no interest in paying $150/month.

They want bigger customers than me, which is fine, but that also means that if and when I turn into a bigger customer, I might already be locked into a different solution.

We were one of these potential bigger customers willing to fork over thousands per month, but the unit cost was still too expensive for us. We tried to negotiate a better bulk rate, but their team was unresponsive and so we eventually went with another service that was more responsive to our needs. According to the article they only have ~3k paying customers, which means they only care about giant top tier customers willing to pay top dollar. Seems like a mistake to me, but what I only know from the potential client perspective.

Either you really aren't getting value, or you don't have many users of your own. $150/mo is much cheaper than building and maintaining something equivalent. $150/mo is nothing compared to even payroll taxes, let alone payroll itself.

    or you don't have many users of your own.

right. yet, hopefully.

I hope folks realize that's ok. Mixpanel made a conscious decision to start at $150 and understands that for certain people theirs no ROI at that price point. I mean Apple could sell a $300 iPhone but they'll leave that to Android.

For the reason you suggest (lock-in during growth), it seems to me that they are being foolish by not having a startup tier. Tens of thousands of $10/mo or $20/mo customers adds up to quite significant revenue.

Maybe this is where they are heading? The heavy sales team route requires larger customers for it to be worth their time converting them to paid users.

They might be looking to cut back on sales and try a more automated approach to convert people to smaller plans.

It can also add a significant customer support burden, which is likely why they haven't done it.

This was exactly the path our startup took as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com