Comment by andreash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreash | Hacker News Reader

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Congrats Peter! I've been using segment.io with many projects and clients since 2012, and I'm superhappy. Peter also helped me alot. My only concerns are:

1. That they will continue to raise prices like many other in the SaaS-space, without grandfathering excisting user/customers.

2. That they will keep limiting certain integrations to their premium plans. This prevents me from integrating with them for new "pet"-projects. I make a lot of MVP-type product for clients, that we test the demand for. For such products, I usually integrate with a lot of tools straight away (GA, Mixpanel, Facebook Ads, Adwords, Optimizely). Even though such MVP-project only will get a few hundre visitors, it still requires Segment.io's "Startup"-plan, which is 79usd/month. I think it makes a lot more sense to allow most integrations for the free plan, and rather segment your customer based on API calls. Many of the integrations that require the Startup-plans are really useful for MVP project (Facebook Ads, Adwords, Kissmetrics, Mailchimp etc.). So please segment your customers based on API-calls, not integrations (maybe except for super expensive enterprise software). I know I could just have one "Startup"-account, and add all the MVP projects to that account, but some of my clients want to have their own segment.io account.

uh, i disagree. strongly.

if you are incorporating their product into commercial projects of your own, how in the world do you come to the conclusion that it should be free?

to segment: raise your prices according to the utility your product provides. make money. this kind of product is changing the way enterprise software is built and sold and viewed at large. i will gladly pay good money to a dozen small saas startups rather than oracle or microsoft or whoever. i've worked for the giants and it's a complete shit show. i know where that money goes and it's not pretty.

i LIKE paying for saas because it feels like i am engaging in an actual business transaction. i trust 'free' (as in gratis) solutions as far as i can throw them.

also, companies that under-charge are toxic elements in the marketplace - they push out healthy firms because they can subsidize the cost of operations and marketing with an unlimited budget of funny money. and when that solution your business is relying on goes out of business because they never had the inclination to make any money, that sucks.

try going to the market and asking about their freemium chicken.

No need to ask, your local super market or big box store probably already has a freemium model -- samples (http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/parenting/2010/08...)

I do, however, whole hardheartedly agree with you sentiment about relying upon free services or saas.

yeah i guess i thought too quick on the supermarket. but a closer analogy would be eating an entire meal of samples every single day.

Retailers are often freemium btw. They have 0 margins on many items and make money on others. That's why best buy pushes warranties etc.

freemium doesn't mean no margin on the cost. it means no cost to the customer.

Thanks Andreas!

1. Yep we've grandfathered all the old customers as we've updated pricing, they keep their old pricing.

2. We're thinking about ways to handle this, and may have some updates soon. There's actually a low API call threshold (5k api calls I believe) where we just won't bother you about payment no matter what integrations you're using.

1. Nice, I think we all agree it's the best solution to give something back to the early-adoptors.

2. Good. There are just so many useful tools for a MVP-projects in your Startup-plan (and some in the Project-plan). You should move most, if not all of them to the Developer-plan. I just think it makes really sense for you to go for the Mixpanel and Stripe-approach of getting as many web products tighly integrated with you at the earliest time possible (at the MVP-stage).

Maybe it makes sense to limit integration in the short term (forces some people to go premium), but I think it'll be better for you in the long term to lower the bar of integrating with you. My experience is that once integrated with you, there is no turning back:)

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