Disclosure: I work for Localytics. Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for wh

Disclosure: I work for Localytics. Overall I agree with Suhail’s points regarding GA being the closest proxy for this service. You do get what you pay for when it comes to advanced analytics. If anything Amazon’s move shows that simple data collection around analytics is becoming commoditized. We tend to price based on MAU’s rather than events to help customers with predictability, but given that event data points are the basis of our (and pretty much all analytics company’s) cost model, that can present challenges. The problem being highlighted in this thread is that the value derived from advanced analytics doesn’t justify the cost in the minds of a lot of startups. There are a variety of reasons for this: not enough users, deeper insights are “interesting” but not game-changing, complex to set up, hard to understand, requires lots of event tagging, etc. Here’s one way to think about the value of more advanced analytics: they are primarily valuable for startups when they power the ability to take action on them (i.e. In the form of marketing campaigns). For example, if creating intricate and specific funnels and flows seems like overkill for your startup e-commerce app, would the value increase if you could send a push or in-app message to users who have dropped at a specific point in a funnel but have purchased before? I suspect that it would, but clearly the value fluctuates depending on the stage and context of your app.