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To everyone complaining about the price point for this service. You are part of The Problem. This is a solo dev's venture, that has a relatively pure and stra

To everyone complaining about the price point for this service. You are part of The Problem. This is a solo dev's venture, that has a relatively pure and straightforward goal. If you can't afford it, don't use it and pick one of the others. Do NOT compare this with a B2C offering that has nothing to do with analytics. Do NOT compare this with a B2B offering that's free and feeds your user's data into the parent corporation's advertising revenue stream. Do NOT compare this with a B2B offering that is open-source, with a team of a dozen core contributors that has had a decade of development under its belt.

curun1r 8y ago
Heh...I had the opposite reaction to the price. As someone building something in the analytics space, $12/mo seems so low that it won't get traction beyond the hobbyist demographic. If you want to sell to business, the price point needs to be at least $200/mo. Plus, I have zero confidence that someone using a naive postgres implementation can scale an analytics backend with customers paying only $12/mo unless all those customers get barely any traffic. Perhaps if he was using Timescale on top of postgres, but even then, $12/mo seems awfully low. But as it is, the price point signals that he doesn't think it's a particularly valuable service.
- Jmcdd 8y ago
  It's an MVP right? Nothing stopping him from changing the model in the future
- epicmuffin 8y ago
  How do you know the postgres implementation is naive? I've worked on several analytics platforms...including offshoots of google analytics within Google itself, and this problem domain is ridiculously easy to shard on natural partitions. And after sharding, you can start to do roll-ups, which Google Analytics does internally. By 2014 when I left, we had a few petabytes of analytics data for a very small but high traffic set of customers. Could we query all of that at once within a reasonable online SLA? No. We partitioned and sharded the data easily and only queried the partitions we needed. If I were to do this now and didn't need near real-time (what is real-time?) I'd use sqlite. Otherwise I'ld use trickle-n-flip on postgres or mysql. There are literally 10+ year-old books[1] on this wrt RDBMS. And yes, even with 2000 clients reaching billions of requests per day, only the top few stressed the system. The rest is long tail. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehousing-Handbook-Rob-Mattison/dp/1847286658 https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehousing-Handbook-Rob-Mattiso...
  - curun1r 8y ago
    There's a comment elsewhere in this thread where he talks about his backend. He didn't explicitly say it was naive, but he definitely gave off that vibe. Is it possible to use postgres in a sophisticated way to work as an analytics store? Sure...Timescale does it and gives you the majority of what you'd need. But it's hard to get right and the creator hasn't given the impression that he's well-versed in this space.
wongarsu 8y ago
Incrementing counters for pageviews, visited page, referer and page width, and putting that into chartjs is something I can put together myself in two hours. It wouldn't be nearly as polished, but it would be 90% there and good enough. Plus I would have a much better idea how well it scales, and generally have less unknowns and risks. The goal is great, the design is sleek, but at the current price point (which is already lowered to $9) and feature set, it's just not worth it to me. For that price the tool has to provide more actionable data or other value. There's probably a market out there, but most of that market is probably not the type of person you will find on hacker news.
- highace 8y ago
  There's always one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Dropbox is a glorified FTP client, Slack is IRC with a nice skin and inline pictures, Spotify is bittorrent without the hassle of downloads (and more legal, but that hasn't stopped people). Convinience matters, and convinience sells. But it is only one of many factors that play into the decision to purchase. Dropbox for example wouldn't sell all that great without the free tier.
    - dymk 8y ago
      If you honestly think that Dropbox is just glorified FTP, or Slack is just IRC with pictures, or Spotify is JUST bittorrent (or Napster even), I question if you've ever actually used any of those services. They provide so much more than the alternatives you listed.
      - vincentkriek 8y ago
        The Dropbox and Spotify examples are ridiculous. They offer a lot more and a lot more usability than the comparison. But Slack basically is just IRC with pictures right? What extra value does slack give me other than a decent web client?

curun1r 8y ago

Heh...I had the opposite reaction to the price. As someone building something in the analytics space, $12/mo seems so low that it won't get traction beyond the hobbyist demographic. If you want to sell to business, the price point needs to be at least $200/mo. Plus, I have zero confidence that someone using a naive postgres implementation can scale an analytics backend with customers paying only $12/mo unless all those customers get barely any traffic. Perhaps if he was using Timescale on top of postgres, but even then, $12/mo seems awfully low. But as it is, the price point signals that he doesn't think it's a particularly valuable service.

Jmcdd 8y ago
It's an MVP right? Nothing stopping him from changing the model in the future
epicmuffin 8y ago
How do you know the postgres implementation is naive? I've worked on several analytics platforms...including offshoots of google analytics within Google itself, and this problem domain is ridiculously easy to shard on natural partitions. And after sharding, you can start to do roll-ups, which Google Analytics does internally. By 2014 when I left, we had a few petabytes of analytics data for a very small but high traffic set of customers. Could we query all of that at once within a reasonable online SLA? No. We partitioned and sharded the data easily and only queried the partitions we needed. If I were to do this now and didn't need near real-time (what is real-time?) I'd use sqlite. Otherwise I'ld use trickle-n-flip on postgres or mysql. There are literally 10+ year-old books[1] on this wrt RDBMS. And yes, even with 2000 clients reaching billions of requests per day, only the top few stressed the system. The rest is long tail. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehousing-Handbook-Rob-Mattison/dp/1847286658 https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehousing-Handbook-Rob-Mattiso...
- curun1r 8y ago
  There's a comment elsewhere in this thread where he talks about his backend. He didn't explicitly say it was naive, but he definitely gave off that vibe. Is it possible to use postgres in a sophisticated way to work as an analytics store? Sure...Timescale does it and gives you the majority of what you'd need. But it's hard to get right and the creator hasn't given the impression that he's well-versed in this space.

wongarsu 8y ago

Incrementing counters for pageviews, visited page, referer and page width, and putting that into chartjs is something I can put together myself in two hours. It wouldn't be nearly as polished, but it would be 90% there and good enough. Plus I would have a much better idea how well it scales, and generally have less unknowns and risks. The goal is great, the design is sleek, but at the current price point (which is already lowered to $9) and feature set, it's just not worth it to me. For that price the tool has to provide more actionable data or other value. There's probably a market out there, but most of that market is probably not the type of person you will find on hacker news.

highace 8y ago
There's always one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Dropbox is a glorified FTP client, Slack is IRC with a nice skin and inline pictures, Spotify is bittorrent without the hassle of downloads (and more legal, but that hasn't stopped people). Convinience matters, and convinience sells. But it is only one of many factors that play into the decision to purchase. Dropbox for example wouldn't sell all that great without the free tier.
  - dymk 8y ago
    If you honestly think that Dropbox is just glorified FTP, or Slack is just IRC with pictures, or Spotify is JUST bittorrent (or Napster even), I question if you've ever actually used any of those services. They provide so much more than the alternatives you listed.
    - vincentkriek 8y ago
      The Dropbox and Spotify examples are ridiculous. They offer a lot more and a lot more usability than the comparison. But Slack basically is just IRC with pictures right? What extra value does slack give me other than a decent web client?