5 ms·

sigh - I really love sentry to bits. Very responsive support, all open source code, nice user interface, no nagging for additional services and very fair price

by pilif 10y ago

sigh - I really love sentry to bits. Very responsive support, all open source code, nice user interface, no nagging for additional services and very fair price (to the point where it's much cheaper to just host with them rather than trying to self-host, despite the thing being extremely well documented and fully supported for self-hosting). I wonder what we'll lose first before they will eventually be sold to get the money back for the investors :( Yes. I'm cynical, but it's always the same path in which good products eventually are shut down or get way too expensive. On the other hand, I would be extremely happy if it was Sentry to prove to the world that you can in-fact take $9M in investment as an Open Source project and still stay independent, keep your original values and not be shut down by an eventual buyer.

thedz 10y ago
As long as it remains open source, nothing prevents you from self-hosting, tho
- pilif 10y ago
  Which is why that's probably the first thing to go away.
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    Definitely not. We're an open source project and have no desires to change that.
    - pilif 10y ago
      Your investors might have desires to change that though.
      - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        I have been a participant to these discussions often enough so I'm quite aware of public perception on those topics :) I think we should be judged by our performance though and we are doing our very best to make sure that people like the product. It would be crazy business to throw our biggest competitive advantage over board. It's not that we do not know why people use us :)
        pilif 10y ago
        Honestly, I think you have the best UX and the best support team and the most compelling price. I just hope this remains the case in the future and I wish you all the best of luck. I will be incredibly happy to be proven wrong on my fears.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        I trust Armin given his excellent open source track record in the Python community. I will be using Sentry when I need to, solely because he works there :)
      - nikcub 10y ago
        You're overstating how much power investors have at this stage of a company. During a seed, Series A, Series B etc. the entrepreneurs are often still in complete control and investors are mere advisors. It is the companies that raise crazy amounts of capital over many rounds who end up at the whim of boards and investors.
        alexmingoia 10y ago
        Equity isn't where all the control comes from. Because they raised 9mil it's almost a sure thing they'll have to raise another round or go bust, so there's huge incentive to do what investors want.
      - daniel_levine 10y ago
        We do not :) Also, hi Nik, been awhile!
- buremba 10y ago
  You first try self-hosting but when things get serious, you usually switch to SaaS version of Sentry because maintaining an extra server and an application which you don't familiar with is not that easy. Open-source is actually a marketing strategy here. It makes the barrier for you to try the software is quite low which is extremely important for both startups and enterprise companies. Even some enterprise companies don't want to pay when they're evaluating your product. If you don't want to pay, then host Sentry on your server, the company behind Sentry doesn't lose anything. In fact they can still benefit from you since you became a part of the community. These people usually advocate Sentry, report bugs etc.
  - thedz 10y ago
    I mean, thanks for describing how many open source companies make money?
    - buremba 10y ago
      It's relatively new in the industry to make money from open-source projects. There are enterprise companies such as Redhat but startups usually scared open-source because of your concerns. I admit that Sentry's approach is actually is bit risky because Sentry is easy to install and maintaining is not that hard unlike the other open-source startups that develop databases. However you need to differentiate your product from your competitors and error-reporting is not actually quite a hard problem, I know many companies that still uses e-mails (send email with stack-trace directly from the app) for error-reporting. Sentry has a unique approach here, it's an advanced error-reporting tool and tries to build a community around Sentry with open-source. If you're a developer who needs error-reporting for your new fancy app, instead of your custom solutions (which are actually workarounds) install Sentry easily and get an advanced error-reporting application for free. Eventually when you work in a enterprise or start a company, you will want to stick with Sentry since you're familiar with it and don't want to take the responsibility to host Sentry so you will switch to SaaS solution. I'm not actually related with company behind Sentry, these are just my thoughts. :)
pdq 10y ago
Right, the standard procedure is to carve up the app into the open-source piece, and then the "enterprise" / "commercial" pieces which will be closed source.
- jerguismi 10y ago
  Nah, I think the most common procedure still is to develop propiertary closed-source software, and charge for that. Sentry is the exception here.
jerguismi 10y ago
Most products are not open source to start with, and are much more profit-oriented from the start. Reminds me of old question: what a socialist says when you give one some gratuitous money? "can I have some more?" (I'm not saying that this is related to socialism)
tedmiston 10y ago
We've self-hosted Sentry for years... it's pretty effortless. I'm a huge fan.
zeeg 10y ago
David here, founder, CEO, and extremely stubborn with my perspective. To echo what Armin and others are saying, we're going to prove that you can build a company around an open source product without turning it into crippleware. There will be things that end up closed source (there already are, like our billing code), but Sentry itself won't be one of them. We're in a fortunate position in that we've been an established (albeit, small) business for a number of years now, so we're able to build off of that existing success and good will.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  I have been using Sentry since Cramer showed it to me for del.lic.ous way back in the day, and I can concur that he means what he says. Now if only he'd remove that stubbornness towards Node.js... :P
- sytse 10y ago
  Great answer David. At GitLab we self host Sentry and love the product. I understand that pilif has reservations, some open source projects prioritized profit over stewardship after raising money. What we did at GitLab is write down how we think about this in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship You may or may not want to do something like that at some point. Anyway, lots of success with Sentry, the product is great and the upcoming features sound awesome.
  - zeeg 10y ago
    Huge props to GitLab. Definitely ahead of us organizationally, but one of the few companies that I pay attention to in the space that seems to be similarly aligned.
    - sytse 10y ago
      Thanks for the kind words Zeeg. Please let me know anytime we can help with anything.
- logicallee 10y ago
daniel_levine 10y ago
Hi Pilif, I led the Seed round in Sentry and am on the Board representing Accel. The single most important part of investing in Sentry for me was the fact that it's Open Source and people love using it. The funding is intended to continue that tradition while also allowing Sentry to more aggressively invest in better mobile support, better support for other languages/environments like C# and SpringBoot, a deeper feature set (Breadcrumbs is a good example http://blog.getsentry.com/2016/05/04/breadcrumbs.html http://blog.getsentry.com/2016/05/04/breadcrumbs.html), better support, etc. Once upon a time I wrote software and I was always annoyed that I couldn't only use Open Source tools so I could audit their code and fork/patch them more easily as needed. Part of the reason for that was that investors have often shied away from products that cater to developers dismissing them as bad business. I think that's bullshit. If everything is going to become software, then the people building software are the most important folks in the world. People like you willing to pay a fair price mean it's quite possible to build a huge business. It's important for us to continue to build a great, Open Source product and offer a SaaS option that's cheaper than doing it yourself. We plan to continue doing that. For now, the thing I don't understand is all the people using proprietary crash reporting tools. Our goal is to make Sentry (Open Source or Saas) the strictly dominant solution for crash reporting. If we can accomplish that and offer a fair service, I think we'll have a good enough business for me :)
- lima 10y ago
  > allowing Sentry to more aggressively invest in better mobile support Why would an operations tool need mobile support? Are we using mobile phones for systems administration now?
  - pfg 10y ago
    I think he's referring to better support for crash reporting inside of mobile apps.
  - daniel_levine 10y ago
    pfg is correct

by pilif 10y ago

thedz 10y ago

As long as it remains open source, nothing prevents you from self-hosting, tho

pilif 10y ago
Which is why that's probably the first thing to go away.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  Definitely not. We're an open source project and have no desires to change that.
  - pilif 10y ago
    Your investors might have desires to change that though.
    - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
      I have been a participant to these discussions often enough so I'm quite aware of public perception on those topics :) I think we should be judged by our performance though and we are doing our very best to make sure that people like the product. It would be crazy business to throw our biggest competitive advantage over board. It's not that we do not know why people use us :)
      - pilif 10y ago
        Honestly, I think you have the best UX and the best support team and the most compelling price. I just hope this remains the case in the future and I wish you all the best of luck. I will be incredibly happy to be proven wrong on my fears.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        I trust Armin given his excellent open source track record in the Python community. I will be using Sentry when I need to, solely because he works there :)
    - nikcub 10y ago
      You're overstating how much power investors have at this stage of a company. During a seed, Series A, Series B etc. the entrepreneurs are often still in complete control and investors are mere advisors. It is the companies that raise crazy amounts of capital over many rounds who end up at the whim of boards and investors.
      - alexmingoia 10y ago
        Equity isn't where all the control comes from. Because they raised 9mil it's almost a sure thing they'll have to raise another round or go bust, so there's huge incentive to do what investors want.
    - daniel_levine 10y ago
      We do not :) Also, hi Nik, been awhile!
buremba 10y ago
You first try self-hosting but when things get serious, you usually switch to SaaS version of Sentry because maintaining an extra server and an application which you don't familiar with is not that easy. Open-source is actually a marketing strategy here. It makes the barrier for you to try the software is quite low which is extremely important for both startups and enterprise companies. Even some enterprise companies don't want to pay when they're evaluating your product. If you don't want to pay, then host Sentry on your server, the company behind Sentry doesn't lose anything. In fact they can still benefit from you since you became a part of the community. These people usually advocate Sentry, report bugs etc.
- thedz 10y ago
  I mean, thanks for describing how many open source companies make money?
  - buremba 10y ago
    It's relatively new in the industry to make money from open-source projects. There are enterprise companies such as Redhat but startups usually scared open-source because of your concerns. I admit that Sentry's approach is actually is bit risky because Sentry is easy to install and maintaining is not that hard unlike the other open-source startups that develop databases. However you need to differentiate your product from your competitors and error-reporting is not actually quite a hard problem, I know many companies that still uses e-mails (send email with stack-trace directly from the app) for error-reporting. Sentry has a unique approach here, it's an advanced error-reporting tool and tries to build a community around Sentry with open-source. If you're a developer who needs error-reporting for your new fancy app, instead of your custom solutions (which are actually workarounds) install Sentry easily and get an advanced error-reporting application for free. Eventually when you work in a enterprise or start a company, you will want to stick with Sentry since you're familiar with it and don't want to take the responsibility to host Sentry so you will switch to SaaS solution. I'm not actually related with company behind Sentry, these are just my thoughts. :)

pdq 10y ago

Right, the standard procedure is to carve up the app into the open-source piece, and then the "enterprise" / "commercial" pieces which will be closed source.

jerguismi 10y ago
Nah, I think the most common procedure still is to develop propiertary closed-source software, and charge for that. Sentry is the exception here.

jerguismi 10y ago

Most products are not open source to start with, and are much more profit-oriented from the start. Reminds me of old question: what a socialist says when you give one some gratuitous money? "can I have some more?" (I'm not saying that this is related to socialism)

tedmiston 10y ago

We've self-hosted Sentry for years... it's pretty effortless. I'm a huge fan.

zeeg 10y ago

David here, founder, CEO, and extremely stubborn with my perspective. To echo what Armin and others are saying, we're going to prove that you can build a company around an open source product without turning it into crippleware. There will be things that end up closed source (there already are, like our billing code), but Sentry itself won't be one of them. We're in a fortunate position in that we've been an established (albeit, small) business for a number of years now, so we're able to build off of that existing success and good will.

chrisabrams 10y ago
I have been using Sentry since Cramer showed it to me for del.lic.ous way back in the day, and I can concur that he means what he says. Now if only he'd remove that stubbornness towards Node.js... :P
sytse 10y ago
Great answer David. At GitLab we self host Sentry and love the product. I understand that pilif has reservations, some open source projects prioritized profit over stewardship after raising money. What we did at GitLab is write down how we think about this in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship You may or may not want to do something like that at some point. Anyway, lots of success with Sentry, the product is great and the upcoming features sound awesome.
- zeeg 10y ago
  Huge props to GitLab. Definitely ahead of us organizationally, but one of the few companies that I pay attention to in the space that seems to be similarly aligned.
  - sytse 10y ago
    Thanks for the kind words Zeeg. Please let me know anytime we can help with anything.
logicallee 10y ago

daniel_levine 10y ago

Hi Pilif, I led the Seed round in Sentry and am on the Board representing Accel. The single most important part of investing in Sentry for me was the fact that it's Open Source and people love using it. The funding is intended to continue that tradition while also allowing Sentry to more aggressively invest in better mobile support, better support for other languages/environments like C# and SpringBoot, a deeper feature set (Breadcrumbs is a good example http://blog.getsentry.com/2016/05/04/breadcrumbs.html http://blog.getsentry.com/2016/05/04/breadcrumbs.html), better support, etc. Once upon a time I wrote software and I was always annoyed that I couldn't only use Open Source tools so I could audit their code and fork/patch them more easily as needed. Part of the reason for that was that investors have often shied away from products that cater to developers dismissing them as bad business. I think that's bullshit. If everything is going to become software, then the people building software are the most important folks in the world. People like you willing to pay a fair price mean it's quite possible to build a huge business. It's important for us to continue to build a great, Open Source product and offer a SaaS option that's cheaper than doing it yourself. We plan to continue doing that. For now, the thing I don't understand is all the people using proprietary crash reporting tools. Our goal is to make Sentry (Open Source or Saas) the strictly dominant solution for crash reporting. If we can accomplish that and offer a fair service, I think we'll have a good enough business for me :)

lima 10y ago
> allowing Sentry to more aggressively invest in better mobile support Why would an operations tool need mobile support? Are we using mobile phones for systems administration now?
- pfg 10y ago
  I think he's referring to better support for crash reporting inside of mobile apps.
- daniel_levine 10y ago
  pfg is correct