5 ms·

Mixpanel (YC S09) Takes Stat Tracking Beyond Google Analytics

123 points by trefn 17y ago

vaksel 17y ago
I think you guys need to rewrite your pricing page, at least tell the user what a data point is If you send less than 20,000 data points per month, Mixpanel is free. If you will be sending more than that, we have a tiered pricing model: Contact us for high volume pricing. * $0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent * $0.25 per 1000 points - next 150,000 points sent * $0.15 per 1000 points - all points after that This pricing includes data storage, analysis, and bandwidth.
- trefn 17y ago
  yeah, it's a bit rough. A data point is a single event you send us - when a user plays a song, pokes someone, or makes a purchase.
  - patio11 17y ago
    You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. Geeks love them, particularly if the algorithm to calculate the price is spiffy. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them. Here's an anecdote for you: our industry is going cloud cloud cloud right now and I am pushing it internally. Enthusiasm among management for test projects is high -- I'm presenting one today, actually. (I rewrote an internal app on the App Engine. It took two days for a prototype, will take two more for getting it production-ready, total cost and schedule less than 10% of when we had more senior, more talented engineers implement the version we are actually using.) So in this process of "Hey, we don't have to actually host hardware here!" evangelism I actually tried to get a purchase order for Slicehost approved for a different project, where I said something to the effect of "It is going to cost us X,000 yen when I'm in development, and X0,000 yen when we move it to production, and Y0,000 yen if this app gets really popular internally." This purchasing request broke my manager. He told me that he'd rather get a request for ten times the highest price I quoted, than try to figure out how he was supposed to incorporate conditional logic into his budget and reporting forecasts for this quarter. Are you sure you don't want to be selling my manager the low-cognitive-pain, easy-to-buy, ten-times-more-expensive version? $0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent Boom, you just broke my manager. Not only are you requiring forecasting and conditional logic from him, you're requiring math. Small Business: $20 Web Application: $100 Enterprise : Call Us There, now we have an unbroken manager. I ask for $100 a month (not because we need it but because my manager won't approve the Small Business so I won't bother asking), he asks "Are you sure we aren't Enterprise?", I say "Yeah, I did the math", he says "OK, approved." [Edited to add: Incidentally, in my own business I'm a stats junkie. There are currently three types of tracking scripts on my pages, plus my rolled-my-own bits, and you very well might be #4. That said: I pay $19 a month for CrazyEgg, which has given me some very valuable insights into user behavior in the past, so valuable that I continue paying for it on a monthly basis despite not actually using it in most given months. At the moment, for example, I think I have no experiments actually running. Now, hypothetically if I were already using MixPanel and savoring that time you made me a thousand dollars by increasing my conversion rate, but didn't currently have an experiment running, you might not be making money from me. That is sort of suboptimal for you, isn't it? I'm willing to pay you for nothing if you have previously delivered wins to me and if I think I might get another win at an unspecified point in the future. This dynamic has earned CrazyEgg about $250 of free money from me. Do you want free money? ;) ]
    - lacker 17y ago
      You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them. How about Amazon's cloud services? Lots of people pay for those. Your story is sad but it sounds like the problem might be more the relationship between you and your manager rather than a problem with all cloud servies.
    - kingsley_20 17y ago
      Quick plug for zuora.com, started by ex-salesforce people (I'm not connected w/them). They make cloud billing models easier for purchasing to swallow. And yes, they're a SaaS provider themselves.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  A little calculator tool would be nice to help me ballpark a price. That, or show some canonical numbers. "ABC company has X daily uniques who frob an average of Y widgets each day. That would cost only $123". Remember: you guys are the experts on analytics, not us. We might have no idea how many data points we have now, or will have when we start using your service. Maybe consider a simplified pricing scheme as well. Anyways -- this looks awesome. Google Analytics covers a lot of stuff for us without having to think. When we've got a spare moment to think about what else we want to track, we'll definitely give this service a try.
kylemathews 17y ago
I've been using mixpanel for a few weeks now -- nice software. The integration (PHP, Javascript) was very easy and the data presentation is easy to understand albeit still a bit rough.
- mjpizz 17y ago
  ditto. Adding Mixpanel tracking was incredibly quick in both Javascript and Ruby, and setting up basic funnel stats is far simpler than with Google Analytics. They've also been really responsive to suggestions.
nkohari 17y ago
Looks very promising. I'm going to be taking a closer look for our application.
modsearch 17y ago
good stuff! I especially like the real-time stats
aberman 17y ago
I have seen Mixpanel in action, and I think it's by far the best solution out there. Congrats on the official launch.
billclerico 17y ago
Love the service - I had it up and running in 5 minutes
mrlebowski 17y ago
How much can they scale? And how much historical data would be stored? I am working on crunching huge weblogs right now and looks like they have already solved the problem (on a smaller scale? The website doesn't talk about traffic that they can handle)!
- suhail 17y ago
  We have people sending us millions a day, we should be fine.
  - snprbob86 17y ago
    I think the original poster is interested in your service, but wants to be confident he can trust it. "millions a day" builds confidence but "mostly under control" puts it right back here we started. Maybe a little bit more detail would put him (and others) at ease?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - suhail 17y ago
      The reason I said "mostly" is because it's naive for anyone to think they have things perfectly under control. No scaling problem is always solved, there's always things that show up. We have it largely under control and are very capable of handling it.
      - mahmud 17y ago
        A good way to end people's fears of your scalability would be to introduce an individually licensed instance of your service and inviting the client to keep things under their own control (if not in their intranet, then on a dedicated host under their control.)
        paraschopra 17y ago
myoung8 17y ago
Only took us a couple of minutes to get things set up too. Congrats on officially launching guys! Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
fariz 17y ago
we've been using mixpanel for our facebook apps since launch and it's helped us greatly, and our entire team loves it. even the pm understands the stats without asking questions (which is usually not the case). understanding how a user uses the application has not only helped us figure out what features the user wants, but also which of those actually WORK (in real time). love it.

123 points by trefn 17y ago

I think you guys need to rewrite your pricing page, at least tell the user what a data point is If you send less than 20,000 data points per month, Mixpanel is free. If you will be sending more than that, we have a tiered pricing model: Contact us for high volume pricing. * $0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent * $0.25 per 1000 points - next 150,000 points sent * $0.15 per 1000 points - all points after that This pricing includes data storage, analysis, and bandwidth.

trefn 17y ago
yeah, it's a bit rough. A data point is a single event you send us - when a user plays a song, pokes someone, or makes a purchase.
- patio11 17y ago
  You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. Geeks love them, particularly if the algorithm to calculate the price is spiffy. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them. Here's an anecdote for you: our industry is going cloud cloud cloud right now and I am pushing it internally. Enthusiasm among management for test projects is high -- I'm presenting one today, actually. (I rewrote an internal app on the App Engine. It took two days for a prototype, will take two more for getting it production-ready, total cost and schedule less than 10% of when we had more senior, more talented engineers implement the version we are actually using.) So in this process of "Hey, we don't have to actually host hardware here!" evangelism I actually tried to get a purchase order for Slicehost approved for a different project, where I said something to the effect of "It is going to cost us X,000 yen when I'm in development, and X0,000 yen when we move it to production, and Y0,000 yen if this app gets really popular internally." This purchasing request broke my manager. He told me that he'd rather get a request for ten times the highest price I quoted, than try to figure out how he was supposed to incorporate conditional logic into his budget and reporting forecasts for this quarter. Are you sure you don't want to be selling my manager the low-cognitive-pain, easy-to-buy, ten-times-more-expensive version? $0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent Boom, you just broke my manager. Not only are you requiring forecasting and conditional logic from him, you're requiring math. Small Business: $20 Web Application: $100 Enterprise : Call Us There, now we have an unbroken manager. I ask for $100 a month (not because we need it but because my manager won't approve the Small Business so I won't bother asking), he asks "Are you sure we aren't Enterprise?", I say "Yeah, I did the math", he says "OK, approved." [Edited to add: Incidentally, in my own business I'm a stats junkie. There are currently three types of tracking scripts on my pages, plus my rolled-my-own bits, and you very well might be #4. That said: I pay $19 a month for CrazyEgg, which has given me some very valuable insights into user behavior in the past, so valuable that I continue paying for it on a monthly basis despite not actually using it in most given months. At the moment, for example, I think I have no experiments actually running. Now, hypothetically if I were already using MixPanel and savoring that time you made me a thousand dollars by increasing my conversion rate, but didn't currently have an experiment running, you might not be making money from me. That is sort of suboptimal for you, isn't it? I'm willing to pay you for nothing if you have previously delivered wins to me and if I think I might get another win at an unspecified point in the future. This dynamic has earned CrazyEgg about $250 of free money from me. Do you want free money? ;) ]
  - lacker 17y ago
    You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. I have yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them. How about Amazon's cloud services? Lots of people pay for those. Your story is sad but it sounds like the problem might be more the relationship between you and your manager rather than a problem with all cloud servies.
  - kingsley_20 17y ago
    Quick plug for zuora.com, started by ex-salesforce people (I'm not connected w/them). They make cloud billing models easier for purchasing to swallow. And yes, they're a SaaS provider themselves.
snprbob86 17y ago
A little calculator tool would be nice to help me ballpark a price. That, or show some canonical numbers. "ABC company has X daily uniques who frob an average of Y widgets each day. That would cost only $123". Remember: you guys are the experts on analytics, not us. We might have no idea how many data points we have now, or will have when we start using your service. Maybe consider a simplified pricing scheme as well. Anyways -- this looks awesome. Google Analytics covers a lot of stuff for us without having to think. When we've got a spare moment to think about what else we want to track, we'll definitely give this service a try.

kylemathews 17y ago

I've been using mixpanel for a few weeks now -- nice software. The integration (PHP, Javascript) was very easy and the data presentation is easy to understand albeit still a bit rough.

mjpizz 17y ago
ditto. Adding Mixpanel tracking was incredibly quick in both Javascript and Ruby, and setting up basic funnel stats is far simpler than with Google Analytics. They've also been really responsive to suggestions.

nkohari 17y ago

Looks very promising. I'm going to be taking a closer look for our application.

modsearch 17y ago

good stuff! I especially like the real-time stats

aberman 17y ago

I have seen Mixpanel in action, and I think it's by far the best solution out there. Congrats on the official launch.

billclerico 17y ago

Love the service - I had it up and running in 5 minutes

mrlebowski 17y ago

How much can they scale? And how much historical data would be stored? I am working on crunching huge weblogs right now and looks like they have already solved the problem (on a smaller scale? The website doesn't talk about traffic that they can handle)!

suhail 17y ago
We have people sending us millions a day, we should be fine.
- snprbob86 17y ago
  I think the original poster is interested in your service, but wants to be confident he can trust it. "millions a day" builds confidence but "mostly under control" puts it right back here we started. Maybe a little bit more detail would put him (and others) at ease?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - suhail 17y ago
    The reason I said "mostly" is because it's naive for anyone to think they have things perfectly under control. No scaling problem is always solved, there's always things that show up. We have it largely under control and are very capable of handling it.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      A good way to end people's fears of your scalability would be to introduce an individually licensed instance of your service and inviting the client to keep things under their own control (if not in their intranet, then on a dedicated host under their control.)
      - paraschopra 17y ago

myoung8 17y ago

Only took us a couple of minutes to get things set up too. Congrats on officially launching guys! Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

fariz 17y ago

we've been using mixpanel for our facebook apps since launch and it's helped us greatly, and our entire team loves it. even the pm understands the stats without asking questions (which is usually not the case). understanding how a user uses the application has not only helped us figure out what features the user wants, but also which of those actually WORK (in real time). love it.