I have to say, a few years ago I was the world’s biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company’s site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a wonderful adjunct part of my analytics stack (and maybe my bill went up to $200 or so when they added that.)

Then they changed their pricing so that bill became $1200 (per month!). Total insanity. When I did some consulting work for another startup that had even higher traffic numbers (150k-200k uniques) but was also very lightly monetized, I actually lost some serious political capital with the CEO when he saw the Segment price quote of nearly $2000 per month. He thought I was trying to fleece them.

Sorry guys. I think you’ve built a REALLY awesome product and I / similarly small businesses are clearly not the target demographic anymore, and I’m sure you’re now making metric boatloads of money from big enterprise customers who don’t care about a $20k annual bill for analytics, but man, it’s disappointing to be so priced out of what was once a great part of my toolkit.

Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience.

Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page.

It's worth a lot less than that to us.

This thread suggests Segment is anchored to their initial value prop for developers here[1]. To this crowd they seem to be more or less a one-way JS wrapper for websites that can later be replaced with a simple "logs to S3" instrumentation.

From my perspective as a "business ops" person, they graduated past this years ago and have unlocked a ton of value with identity normalization and server-side Track events, particular in moving data around between core product and the services marketing + sales use to acquire and engage customers.

Segment is the one place I can manually push an identity update or Track event and know it will be broadcast back to all the other endpoints, including a warehouse. In addition, the services I use also push their user activity back to Segment as a destination, which then automatically broadcasts it back out to everything else.

Asking product engineers to do all this work every time a new need pops up (a) literally never happens, and (b) if it does happen, drives them crazy because they hate working on that stuff and they'll never touch it again once v1 ships.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076

I've used Segment at two companies in a row (in both cases they were implemented at early stages before I joined). It's a good product with broken pricing. They charge insane amounts of money for add-ons and seem to get exponentially more expensive as you grow. My recent renegotiation with them was the most painful experience with a vendor in my 12 year career.

I want to like Segment, I really do. But until they change their attitude I strongly recommend against using them. Especially for startups, because it's not easy to get off once you deeply integrate Segment into your stack.

If you run a business, I really don't understand the appeal of sharing a crucial part of your data (for web based applications / services) with a third-party (Google, Amazon etc. or maybe even Segments in the future) that may at some point compete with you ... especially when you can just parse your own web logs ...

Data volume-based pricing is a bit out of control across most analytics/data products. My company has been moving away from volume-based pricing to a feature/value-based model.

The big challenge is aligning data scale to company size/price.

I suspect Segment is trying to solve for this very problem with their price increases but at the expense of smaller business. The 'startup' program is a great way for them to keep the platform accessible to new businesses. I applaud them for that.

--

Shameless plug: My company Indicative (https://www.indicative.com), a customer/behavioral analytics platform that integrates with Segment. We offer 1 billion events/user actions a month for free for Segment users, so that all companies, especially startups can start using data in bringing their products to market and without having to worry about data limits.

This is an email I just sent internally:

XXXX,

Yeah....We need to have a conversation and push back on them-

IMHO, Segments pricing starts breaking down as company's scale because of a couple factors, that generally allow people to push back.

Some of these reasons (that I know of...and I'm sure you know better), are:

1. Google tag manager is free

2. Many services, like Marketo, don't allow Segment to use their universal javascript widget...so you end up using Segment as a tag manager to push that provider's proprietary widget...reducing the value of Segment. In fact, if you look at the "www." side of our website, we could directly instrument 2 sdk's and remove segment (so net +1 javascript library) and dump segment all together. This would also significantly reduce the unique people count...how they bill!

3. We'll soon have a full-time front engineer focused on the website...So it's not very painful to instrument a new sdk, or add a shared cookie between sdk's.

4. There are options that are really good at moving log files (e.g., fluentd.org) for server side logging. It's how the big boys move log files :)

5. According to google analytics...we're at XX,XXX across webapp + www, so not sure why they are saying YYY,YYY

I realize there's value in Segment, but we can push back on pricing increases.

One last thing, allowing us access to our historic pricing, with no additional functionality, doesn't seem like a big give...especially as pricing usually reduces as you scale. So I am very skeptical of this "new pricing" line of reasoning they are trying to pull!

Looking forward to talking to them ~N

I too tried their product, loved it, but couldn't use it because of the insane pricing -- despite me having a fairly small website and just wanting to get better insights to help start making a profit. I quickly exceeded their free limits (within two weeks) and the jump up to $200 per month was just ludicrous. I was also contacted by a very friendly sales/support person but they just couldn't see how spending $200 per month just wouldn't be feasible for me.

Add me to the list of former Segment users. A pricing change made them want to bump our bill from $199 to $10999.

I would explain to them that this was insane. They’d grandfather me in for a quarter. But every quarter I’d get new urgent emails from a new account rep who thought they were going to make a huge score.

We rebuilt event pipes (really not that hard) in house and used stitchdata for pulling from external sources. DIY isn’t without work, but use a hosted Kafka and it’s really not a ton of work. And gives you a ton of flexibility.

I get their niche but I don’t trust their pricing/business further than I can throw them.

Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?

Ah damn, signed up for segment one week ago or so. Some you win, some you lose I guess.

Echoing other commenters, pricing plans are quite steep for the more modest businesses out there who might have a pretty large reach (Monthly users) but nowhere near the budget to shell out big $$.

Tis a shame cause as someone with a foot in tech and the other one in marketing, I know there's a lof value for the real world businesses out there (outside of the tech bubble) but having to spend what I guess is a hefty amount of cash every month just for the pipes is going to be a hard sell for folks which might be already struggling to see value in investing in technology.

Was thinking about using segment here but their pricing is insane.

Many product analytics companies have absolutely crazy pricing. Simply not worth it for the odd experiment, measuring MAU and a few other key metrics.

I think we are likely to setup track.domain.com/event endpoint dumping events into Redshift given that we will use SQL to report anyway.

Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.

I remember a few years ago I was working for a company that wanted to build a Segment clone, just a clone without any different functionality, with hopes they would raise money. Even when I asked how a feature should be implemented, instead of showing me some designs, all they would do was open up Segment and show me the feature... Suffice to say, the project failed and I wasn't surprised nor sad.

We created a Segment account over a year ago, but didn't start using the service because (a) our startup wasn't quite ready, or had the traffic to collect meaningful data, and (b) couldn't afford the pricing at the time.

I wonder if we could transition that old account to this new startup plan, as we are still at early stage (just got into our first accelerator a few months ago) and bootstrapped?

Segment is great for early-stage startups as it takes care of data pipeline for you so that you don't need to hire data engineers or waste time downloading reports from marketing tools and analyzing data offline using a BI solution or Excel.

Since it doesn't provide any user interface that allows you to get insights from Segment data, you need to use a BI tool in order to be able to make use of this data which also requires you to dedicate resource and spend some time on it.

Early stage startups usually don't have enough time and resource so we have been working on a tool that allows you to integrate Segment data-warehouse and run segmentation, funnel and retention queries. You can think of it as Mixpanel UI for your Segment data. Here is the details: https://rakam.io/integration/segment/

The form won't accept 0 in the total funding raised input. MacOS/Chrome

clicked on the link to read this, apparently my pi hole has the domain blocked

I really loved Segment when they launched and recommended them repeatedly to anyone who would listen. I can no longer recommend them because of price and instead suggest people hack something together themselves or use Google Tag Manager. It's just not worth getting your company locked in even if they might give you a startup rate right now.

It was also really frustrating to us doing work in the political and advocacy sector that the their EU GDPR Data Processing Agreement explicitly forbids using their product for any of the things our EU clients would need like measuring petition signatures or donations to causes -- since those might be information about "political opinions" which their terms prohibit. This particular GDPR interpretation is somewhat unusual, we've negotiated workable DPAs with almost everyone else we've wanted to do business with but Segment was unmovable.

This is awesome. Segment has always been a tool that speeds up our experimentation dramatically but the cost has been tough to swallow. I’m grateful your team has built this new program!

I'm having trouble understanding what the use-case for Segment is.

Mind you: I work in a pretty unrelated field and almost never deal with the frontend/web stack.

What would I use it for?

This landing page (especially the code/data example) is the best example on why we need something like GDPR. "Look how easy it is, I'll just send your personal identifiable data everywhere at once!!"

They need to define "Startup". What about an established business with a new 'startup'-like product?

Oh Nice! I’ve been waiting for that.

Back when I was in school there's this guy who sold meth. First hit was free.

Hey, wanted to say that I really appreciate the feedback and we're releasing this program exactly to address it. This is Ilya, one of the co-founders of Segment.

Re: how the program works on the backend — For new startups (<2 years, <$5M raised), the Startup Program provides $25k of annual credit (and $50k credit if you're applying thru an accelerator) on the team plan which makes "Segment Free" for 99% of the thousands of startups that use Segment. You can apply for it for multiple years, and after you graduate, we'll provide graduated discounts off our standard plans (50% in year 1). This is designed to be affordable for the entire time that a startup is getting off the ground.

Re: value over time — we see companies of 2+ years of age use an average of 7 source types (web, mobile, crm, stripe, ..) and 8 destination types (google analytics, event analytics tool, data warehouse, email marketing tool, A/B testing tool, ..) accounting for 56 point to point integrations. Each source <> destination connection takes an average of 24 hours to do initial API integration and more beyond to maintain, so hours can add up. (https://segment.com/academy/choosing-stack/how-stacks-evolve...)

We're also buffering data behind the scenes with Centrifuge when partner APIs have a downtime event to get your data deliverability as high as possible :) (https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/)

Either way — this feedback is super helpful, and if you'd like to chat more I'm ilya@ segment.com. Thanks!

We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane.

Took 1 day to rewrite.

Yes, I completely agree. It just came across as greedy at the end of the day. Especially given their billing model relies on MTU, when 80% of most websites traffic are fly in fly out visitors.

It's my favourite technology, but unaffordable for pretty much any company not burning some VCs money.

Same thing happened at a company I work at. We got a quote back from Segment, the price was ludicrous, so we rolled our own in a week or so. Increased our Azure bill a bit (500/mo), but still soooooo much cheaper than Segment.

Yes, it’s possible to have your engineering team build its own version of Mixpanel. And it may actually cost you less than it cost Mixpanel to build Mixpanel because it’s more focused on your needs.

But you know who has already built Mixpanel? Mixpanel. And they’ll let your business use if for a couple hundred dollars a month. Starting today, not six months from now when your version would be finished.

Better still, if you use Mixpanel’s Mixpanel instead of the one you built yourself, you can have your dev team develop your product during all that time they would have otherwise been building somebody else’s product for internal use.

Build versus buy. It’s a thing for a reason.

Agreed.

I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's + timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something unique then you're better off building your own analytics.

Also, realistically most businesses are built on top of databases. So the most important stuff is in the databases anyway. So might as well just put metrics in SQL too.

The value for pure tech players might be low -as in, you could hack something that does 90%+ of what segment does for you.

But for every other biz that happens to be on the internet, ie e-commerce, not having to rely on a tech team for implementing various services has some value. If you consider that some websites can only be updated every few months or so, having a third party manage that for you is a life-saver.

I've seen / helped too many marketing folks try to get some services (read pixels) implemented and it's always been a Shih-tzuh :)

Is there any examples of startups that have failed due to their use of Google Analytics and google competing with them?