Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

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So, since I'm an unrepentant cynic, I guess it's now, like 1.5 months until the inevitable "Sentry: it has been an interesting journey" blog post?

Anyway, so, I tried Sentry at some point, like, five years ago. Signed up for the 'team' plan, even though it's just lonely me, and had bugs coming in for about... a week, maybe less? Then, my subscription suddenly became inactive, because I had exceeded the 10K (or so, at the time) bugs that they were willing to track for me. Not, unique bugs, mind you, just the same bug that the same automated process was hitting every second or so.

But still, I now had to either negotiate an "Enterprise" price plan, or go away elsewhere. And I did actually ping them about the former, but never got a response. So, well, back to manually reading logs like an animal it is, then, I guess?

TL;DR: If your vision is to solve a certain problem, aren't the oh-we-didn't-see-that-coming corner cases the most interesting?

Sentry's been around for ~15 years, and has been using a license fitting the Fair Source definition for ~5 years. This is not a "hastily preparing ourselves to be acquired" sort of move. What makes you think this is a sign of some impending change?

Sentry's pricing plan has never gone from 10k errors straight to "negotiated enterprise deal"; you must have missed something. I say this having been a Sentry customer for the past 7 years across multiple companies, always with a paid plan beyond 10k errors and never with an enterprise deal.

> Sentry's pricing plan has never gone from 10k errors straight to "negotiated enterprise deal"

OK, maybe not, but, on the current version of https://sentry.io/pricing/:

Developer (free): 5K errors

Team (US$312/user/year): 50K errors

Business (US$960/user/year): 50K errors

Enterprise (who knows): who knows

So, they now go from 50K (which sounds close enough to '10K 5-or-so years ago', right?) errors to "negotiated enterprise deal", and I have no idea whether that's worth it?

Do they coalesce errors these days? Again: I would love to use services like these, and I even don't mind getting a customized pricing plan, except that nobody like, ever, seems to want to talk about even the most basic details?

"Just give us your credit card number, and we'll see what happens, we'll make it work"... Right! But, but by any means, go and complain on HN that's it impossible to get paying customers...

I would recommend reading more of the pricing page. You'll learn that:

- $312/year and $960/year are for unlimited users, not per seat

- Additional error/event volume is priced separately from the base plan

- You can pay for error volume, either prepaid or on-demand, without a custom enterprise deal:

> Each of our plans comes with a defined quota, with the option to process additional events by setting a pay-as-you-go budget. You can also plan ahead and save 20% over the pay-as-you-go rates by reserving events.

What's the concern here? The pricing is transparent, and yes we've adjusted it over the years to be more in line with our costs. We still charge you per error just like we have since I started the business, and we're very honest about that. If you scrolled down you would see a full transparent pricing calculator for all of our product offerings.

wrt Enterprise, you seem to not be the target person. Its primarily about access to humans. Terms, liabilities, SLAs, services, etc. If you are FAANG scale, yes it is about price negotiation as well. When you are in the buying cycle at a company that needs these kinds of things you are well accustomed to this kind of thing.

My concern is, as per my original post, that:

1. A single component in my app causes the same error over and over again, every second or so

2. This causes me to run out of my 10K, 50K, or whatever, fully paid-up 'Teams' or 'Business' allowance within the first day, and then my account gets disabled

3. Once my account gets disabled, my only option is to "contact Sales" and they never reply to me (in the case of Sentry), or quote me an amount that I'm simply unable to pay (in the case of many other similar services).

So, you could address this concern by stating that you now coalesce similar errors, and that my scenario is no longer an issue. Or, you could just punt me to a sales contact. Or, just, basically, tell me to "get gud" and get back in touch once my services have proper error handling.

Instead, you chose to pretend that I can't write properly, which, frankly re-confirms my notion about Sentry: RUN AWAY WHILE YOU CAN! This goes doubly for employees, BTW, so... consider yourself informed!

This isn't how Sentry works though.

1. You have a burst of errors - typically this happens first month when people dont understand their volume, or they had a runaway bug.

2. We rate limit/throttle you for your billing period. We also provide some tools that we'll eat various cost for periods of time (such as Inbound Filters and Spike Protection).

3. You never have to "contact sales", but you're certainly welcome to email support, and they almost always will forgive your volume.

It sounds like you want us to pick up the cost, which sure, sounds great as a customer, but we're trying to build a long term sustainable business. We can't just accept infinite data and not charge for it. All of that costs money, and while in some less common scenarios you can dedupe client side (we do), mostly they have to hit our servers, and that has a cost associated.

It is how Sentry used to work, though, and if you want to forward me the emails proving that, just supply me with your work email.

Good to hear that things changed, though: for me, it's a bit late, but, hey, I'm not your target audience anyway.

> I guess it's now, like 1.5 months until the inevitable "Sentry: it has been an interesting journey" blog post?

That’s the beauty though: if we really fuck up it eventually fully turns into open source.

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