there's a bunch of great hosted tools out there, across ETL, workflows, dashboards, etc. Think Fivetran, Segment, Matillion, Periscope, etc. And then of course the warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, etc.
But I think there are three issues with that stack, roughly like this (I've got to do some more thinking, would appreciate your input):
- Privacy: you have your customer data flying around in all these different tools. it's hard to impossible to track your compliance
- cost: all these vendors charge in some way by data volume, MAUs, etc. - you get taxed multiple times for the same data stream. It all adds up.
- control: your data is subject to pre-determined schemas, proprietary formats, black boxes, etc. - mismatch for the same metric across different tools, less flexibility to manipulate your data and pack up and go elsewhere.
I think there's a valid open source alternative for every layer of the stack:
Segment --> Rudder Labs, Snowplow
Matillion --> Airflow, dbt
Fivetran --> Stitch / Singer
Periscope, Looker, Tableau, etc. --> Metabase, Superset
Warehouses --> just yesterday I learned about materialize.io here on HN
And then add open source products like PostHog, that add additional value for very specific use cases (in this case product analytics).
Not arguing the value of the hosted products. They are amazing to use if you just get started. But there's a great open source "stack" available that long term likely will be more transparent, more flexible, and cheaper.
Would love your thoughts!