Hacker News Reader

Comment by cornflake | Hacker News Reader

Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience.

Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page.

It's worth a lot less than that to us.

View on HN

Hey, wanted to say that I really appreciate the feedback and we're releasing this program exactly to address it. This is Ilya, one of the co-founders of Segment.

Re: how the program works on the backend — For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised), the Startup Program provides $25k of annual credit (and $50k credit if you're applying thru an accelerator) on the team plan which makes "Segment Free" for 99% of the thousands of startups that use Segment. You can apply for it for multiple years, and after you graduate, we'll provide graduated discounts off our standard plans (50% in year 1). This is designed to be affordable for the entire time that a startup is getting off the ground.

Re: value over time — we see companies of 2+ years of age use an average of 7 source types (web, mobile, crm, stripe, ..) and 8 destination types (google analytics, event analytics tool, data warehouse, email marketing tool, A/B testing tool, ..) accounting for 56 point to point integrations. Each source <> destination connection takes an average of 24 hours to do initial API integration and more beyond to maintain, so hours can add up. (https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve...)

We're also buffering data behind the scenes with Centrifuge when partner APIs have a downtime event to get your data deliverability as high as possible :) (https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/)

Either way — this feedback is super helpful, and if you'd like to chat more I'm ilya@ segment.com. Thanks!

> For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised)

Basically this definition works for venture-backed startups, who will fail or get big funding in 2 years. For those of us taking a slower, lower-risk path, two years is a pretty short cutoff for "startup" status.

If the entry-level, non-startup pricing were more modest, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But reading the comments about pricing here, it seems like the non-startup pricing is very high.

One of the characteristics I appreciate and look for most about software vendors is clear reasonable pricing. Temporary discounts, negotiated rates, applications, and the like push me away from products and make it much harder to sell what I want up the management chain.

We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane.

Took 1 day to rewrite.

Lambda + S3?

How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?

I don’t recall the exact quote. We do have a ton of traffic (more so back then as it was a freemium product then). Not sure if it included their warehouse as well.

Our dev team at the time said rewriting it internally was impossible, so we actually paid it for 6 months. After changing the team, this was on the top of the list. It was trivial to switch.

Now, all the services that we used were stable so the benefit of easily adding and removing services was not something we needed.

Rightscale suffered similar fate when their rates kept going up. At some point it became cheaper to rewrite it ourselves.

> Took 1 day to rewrite.

did you consider making it Open Source?

Yes, I completely agree. It just came across as greedy at the end of the day. Especially given their billing model relies on MTU, when 80% of most websites traffic are fly in fly out visitors.

It's my favourite technology, but unaffordable for pretty much any company not burning some VCs money.

Same thing happened at a company I work at. We got a quote back from Segment, the price was ludicrous, so we rolled our own in a week or so. Increased our Azure bill a bit (500/mo), but still soooooo much cheaper than Segment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com