16 ms·

Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the

by ralfn 13y ago

Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the product itself doesn't require one to invest a lot of time, which is a good thing. Just some questions: - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip? - why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me). - why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches? I like the singular focus. Some people don't want very complicated feature rich monitor systems. I can imagine using a solution like this, esspecially in those cases, where more feature rich monitor systems are not being considered. Yet, you offer a pricing model that suggests something completely different. That you are a very complicated feature-rich monitor system. The value you provide at each price point is simply not warranted. I doubt this will have a large uptake, but if it does, i'm the first one tempted to compete. The required architecture is not complicated enough to warrant such high margins on such low costs. Cloud providers, even the budget ones like DigitalOcean, could easily offer something like this for free to their customers. Now, you could argue that the price includes high quality support. But that's the not the audience of such a singular focus tool. If i need support, i'm obviously spending enough time interacting with it, that i would be better off with a more feature-rich monitor system. (which are available at similar price points) Who's going to pay 600 dollars a year for 300 snitches? To build this at scale may take more effort, but from the perspective of your customer .. wouldn't most of them be able to build something like this for internal use in a single day? There are open source solutions with more features you can install with a single command. I'm just wondering: but wouldn't you have much more customers, and hence, more profit, if you would provide 500 snitches at 100 dollars a year? Or alternatively, offer the service for free, but just charge for the apps yearly? In the end, a single snitch will do at most 24 empty GET requests a day, where you store a timestamp. A single VPS should be able to handle 10k snitches easily. (less than 3 requests per second)

struppi 13y ago
You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it. The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is really cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses. I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center, I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  "I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it." Yes, you do run a business, yourself. But outside that... The problem with this sort of thinking is that, yes, sure, if you need it, you could happily pay $600/year for this service, and another, and another, and another, and pretty soon you're dropping $5-$10k on services. For a large business, that's probably not an issue (but even then, it's always out of someone's budget, not the entire company's), but for smaller companies, you're approaching a pain threshold.
- ralfn 13y ago
  >You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I get that. But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features. This isn't actually competing with DataDog, Munin, Nagios, New Relic on features or reliability. >? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses. If thats the bussiness risk you are taking, you shouldn't be depending on just a ping after a cron job! Phooff. You do realize this thing is essentially only measuring if the cron job has executed. Not if it is succesfull. Sure you can script the success/failure state. But how are you going to test that against a myrid of potential failure states? What does the proccess return when the OOMKILLER gets its? Do you know? The only reason to use something that 'just does pings' is because it's not important enough, and you don't want to invest that much time and effort. Those other tools require to be a integral part of your setup, but they'll give you much better monitoring capabilities and actual ease of mind. More importantly, rather than warning you when things have gone wrong (after the fact), they'll warn you in advance things are not looking good. They'll monitor the actual proccess, not if they were launched every hour, but what they were up to. This product is in a very interesting niche because it seems to target projects-not-important-enough-i-wouldnt-bother-but-if-its-this-easy-why-not. But it is not priced accordingly. >Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now. Those projects where you don't need them for: those are only ones where a product like this makes sense. If there are lots of dollars on the line, i strongly suggest you use actual industrial-grade monitoring solutions, not a ping after a cron job.
jameskilton 13y ago
One of the developers here. Glad you liked the branding! As you've mentioned, our goal is to stay stupidly simple to use. We want users to forget we're even here, until something isn't working. Now as for your questions: > - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? We don't currently have such protections in place basically because it hasn't been necessary. We keep an eye on things and if we start to see such traffic we'll investigate what should be done at that time. > - why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me). Time and customer requests. We've started looking into building an Android app and glanced at Windows Phone as well. That said, mobile apps aren't required to use DMS, the default is to send emails. > - why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches? We have actually just started rolling out a new API! If you're interested in helping us beta test this, get a hold of us at hi@deadmanssnitch.com. As for pricing, plans are built around the peace-of-mind our product offers customers. Our canonical example is an ops engineer needing a backup only to find out that backups haven't worked for the past weeks/months/etc. At that point the cost of DMS is a pittance to what the lack of backups just cost the company in question.
- nikatwork 13y ago
  I would ignore the feedback around pricing. Anyone who beefs over $600 and thinks they "won't need support" is not worth having as a customer. $600 is fine for SMB and wouldn't even register for enterprise.

by ralfn 13y ago

struppi 13y ago

You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it. The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is really cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses. I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center, I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).

mgkimsal 13y ago
"I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it." Yes, you do run a business, yourself. But outside that... The problem with this sort of thinking is that, yes, sure, if you need it, you could happily pay $600/year for this service, and another, and another, and another, and pretty soon you're dropping $5-$10k on services. For a large business, that's probably not an issue (but even then, it's always out of someone's budget, not the entire company's), but for smaller companies, you're approaching a pain threshold.
ralfn 13y ago
>You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I get that. But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features. This isn't actually competing with DataDog, Munin, Nagios, New Relic on features or reliability. >? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses. If thats the bussiness risk you are taking, you shouldn't be depending on just a ping after a cron job! Phooff. You do realize this thing is essentially only measuring if the cron job has executed. Not if it is succesfull. Sure you can script the success/failure state. But how are you going to test that against a myrid of potential failure states? What does the proccess return when the OOMKILLER gets its? Do you know? The only reason to use something that 'just does pings' is because it's not important enough, and you don't want to invest that much time and effort. Those other tools require to be a integral part of your setup, but they'll give you much better monitoring capabilities and actual ease of mind. More importantly, rather than warning you when things have gone wrong (after the fact), they'll warn you in advance things are not looking good. They'll monitor the actual proccess, not if they were launched every hour, but what they were up to. This product is in a very interesting niche because it seems to target projects-not-important-enough-i-wouldnt-bother-but-if-its-this-easy-why-not. But it is not priced accordingly. >Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now. Those projects where you don't need them for: those are only ones where a product like this makes sense. If there are lots of dollars on the line, i strongly suggest you use actual industrial-grade monitoring solutions, not a ping after a cron job.

jameskilton 13y ago

One of the developers here. Glad you liked the branding! As you've mentioned, our goal is to stay stupidly simple to use. We want users to forget we're even here, until something isn't working. Now as for your questions: > - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? We don't currently have such protections in place basically because it hasn't been necessary. We keep an eye on things and if we start to see such traffic we'll investigate what should be done at that time. > - why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me). Time and customer requests. We've started looking into building an Android app and glanced at Windows Phone as well. That said, mobile apps aren't required to use DMS, the default is to send emails. > - why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches? We have actually just started rolling out a new API! If you're interested in helping us beta test this, get a hold of us at hi@deadmanssnitch.com. As for pricing, plans are built around the peace-of-mind our product offers customers. Our canonical example is an ops engineer needing a backup only to find out that backups haven't worked for the past weeks/months/etc. At that point the cost of DMS is a pittance to what the lack of backups just cost the company in question.

nikatwork 13y ago
I would ignore the feedback around pricing. Anyone who beefs over $600 and thinks they "won't need support" is not worth having as a customer. $600 is fine for SMB and wouldn't even register for enterprise.