Well, this was stupidly easy to integrate into a web-app, but my first (and only) session has consistently been grouped into the 30-60 minute session length bucket, from the moment the session was born (first event logged) to ten minutes later.

(The user event stream for the individual user shows the correct session length though.)

This would make me wary of the rest of the data. Not to mention that all of the more interesting reports are in the paid plans, which makes 10M free events that you can't report on of limited value.

Edit: The first event for the first user / session in the "real-time activity details" has a usage time of "20 min", wheras the first event for the second user / session starts at 0 seconds, so the bug lies there somewhere, and seems like it shouldn't have a meaningful impact on statistics for an app in production with lots of users, but disconcerting for a first-time dev-user of Amplitude to see bogus values.

The thing I don't like about analytics as a service is that, most of the time, it's highly opinionated about how to track and visualize data. We tried a number of analytic services in the past, but no matter how flexible they were, we always found corner cases or certain ways of visualizing and presenting the data that we wished existed but for some or other reason weren't possible, because each respective service always expects you to do things in a certain way at the end of the day. Which is understandable, because you can't have a fully featured dashboard right off the bat without an opinion about how should that work and be presented, so as an analytics provider it isn't an easy problem to solve unless you go the keen.io route and offer an analytics as back-end service only.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while services like these are great, I find that eventually after a certain size startups will almost always need to have in-house analytics infrastructure to cover all use cases and needs specific to the business. Not that services like Amplitude don't have their place, which they do, I just wish there was an universal solution to that problem. But I suppose you can't help rolling your own infrastructure given specific enough needs.

What's support like for this plan? I previously worked at an analytics startup in a support role and there were always tons of questions. It got expensive to provide excessive support to free plan customers; they were often the least savvy ones and had the most questions! I always wanted to error on the side of helping out the customers, but there's a point where your employer is losing serious money. For your system to not have a ton of questions during onboarding and throughout to the average user, would be amazing. Or is this an expense you plan to eat for now as you grow?

What's your security story? A search for "security" or "privacy" on your help docs returns zero results. The privacy policy makes no mention of any certifications (SOC 2 Type II, Tier 3 SSAE 16, TRUSTe, third-party audits, etc). How can I trust my data with your service?

Hi all, founder of Amplitude here. We've always felt volume based pricing to be bad for analytics culture as it discourages tracking and so are taking as aggressive of a stance as we can here. Would love HN's feedback!

"Analytics is often the single largest infrastructure expense for a company." I'm interested in seeing some supporting evidence. Listed references do not refer to any study or real evidence. This may be true for companies that entire strategy is analytics or ad-based. (See Deloitte 2014 CIO survey -- lots of companies not even doing analytics or feel they are not spending enough on analytics.)

sskates/et al: This is awesome - we will be trying it. We've built internal tools very similar to what you guys are doing, so it's great that we have the option to not do that anymore! Question: I am super tempted at using the free tier, and just route a sample of users towards Amplitude. After all, using just a sample is enough to discover patterns, test hypothesis and identify product-change ideas. While the ~$1000/mo price range could probably make a lot of sense for us later, right now it's a bit too much. Can I be confident you won't change the free tier deal in the near future?

We've been struggling with metrics for awhile now. We're hitting all the "enterprise" plans with our sessions + mau, and just can't afford it. Seems silly to build and maintain our own metrics, so glad we finally have Amplitude for all our needs.

The dashboard api is amazing. We only need a few simple numbers, and the API works fantastic.

Thinks like custom dashboards are cool, but we're able to just grab the numbers onto our own that we have melded with other services as well.

This is great for companies without a lot of data yet. Often times a big hurdle is the large price tag based on volume, when a company may have no clue as to their actual volume benchmarks because they haven't gotten as far as tracking their event data to the level they could/should. So a salesperson asks how many events they would have, and the response is "how the hell should I know?"

Your growth discovery engine feature looks pretty cool, as does the event path report. This looks similar to conversion path reports I've seen in GA's attribution data.

Unfortunately, a lot of times those reports look nice but don't help much because they fail to provide meaningful insights when dealing with any sort of user volume. I've always wanted some sort of zoom out view that lets me view color-coded patterns or something like that so I can visually get a sense of what is going on and let my brain's pattern recognition abilities go to work to spot clusters. This is what in turn informs the questions to feed into your growth report, since your customers may not know the right questions to ask yet. Providing tools to give the answers isn't enough, you have to provide tools that spit out the questions ;)

Looks good, just giving a shot at integrating. On the API, it would be great if your events API would accept a user-agent string, would make generating events on the server easier, and lighten the JS blob for clients.

We just migrated over to Amplitude and they've been great to work with. With another company we were maxing out our # of events pretty regularly. The solution was to upgrade, but each new tier was significantly more. In a startup, you want to measure more items, not less, so this model makes a lot of sense. Varun and Bryan have been great to work with. I'm also pretty excited to start working with their data science team. Feel free to ask me any questions. I highly recommend these guys!

Has anyone tried both Mixpanel and Amplitude? What are your recommendations? We are deciding which one to use for our startup. We are specifically interested in measuring: 1/ retention (as per Amplitude's video), 2/ usage patterns on mobile, and 3/ user flows. Thanks

Just want to say that we're a very happy Amplitude customer and have been since early on.

This looks neat and the video on the post highlights stuff that we've always wanted to do with mixpanel, but couldn't really manage that easily. Even things like copying a query and just changing one parameter is a drag with mixpanel.

All that being said, the free plan doesn't include all those neat features like cohort analysis, and the paid plan is way beyond our reach at ~$1k. We're currently paying around $300 to mixpanel, and that's already maxing out our small budget. We would love to have a paid plan with less events, but more functionality at a more affordable price point.

This is amazing. Always thought that Mixpanel was overpriced

It always strikes me that data collection and data analysis are tightly coupled, when it comes to pricing. And then when you look at the tiers that are available (995 a month really?) it makes even less sense. Yes its cheeper than me hiring in house to "do it myself" but it still feels like I'm being taken advantage of.

Here is the reality of how this works. Someone on the business side sees a shiny dashboard and wants one. The product involved gets pitched over the fence to engineering, and we go to the site. We know from go that we are fucked cause the header doesn't mention API/Developer or the words integration. Because we have a JOB that we probably like we click on help...

Oh look integration docs, Maybe there is hope for this turd!

Wait I'm on zen desk? There are broken pages (there are broken pages)? No public forms (well at least they aren't apparent).

This tool like the 16 other analytics packages we run, are going to be a flash in the pan, or so narrowly defined that it will be single use. Im not going to put anything useful in here, because, well when we hit that cap we will be asked to "cull data" rather than pay.

Keys to success in this space: Give a shit about the guys implementing your service. If you can't be bothered to build and run and host your own documentation I don't know what to say. If your going to send me to a third party, at least have user forums / public user communication front and center. Let me know that people are having issues, that your addressing them.

Give me a way to tier out data. Yes you sold my business person on the "free" tier thats nice. Let me give you the data they are going to want at some point, let me do it in such a way that you can put it in cold storage till I need it. Give me a way to back it up to your S3 at cost, or to where I want (my own S3 my own data storage solution for free). Give me a way to "keep myself under the cap" by moving the data I want around.

A while later, some business person wants to see "something new" in the dashboard... Well guess what, we have been collecting that all along, go pay the vendor get the history and see it in real time. If you can do THAT without having to involve ME as an engineer then you have a winner on your hands, otherwise your just analytics implementation 17 and we will move on to 18.

good, analytics has always been overpriced

Are you Safe Harbor compliant?

The pricing page is unclear; is the $995 business plan per month or per year?

Thanks, I'll add this to a website tonight.

Just signed up. this is good enough that I'm willing to move away from Mixpanel, I love Mixpanel, but with this type of offering and what seems like a much more refined UI, I'm sold!

So, you moved from volume pricing to limiting features that we can use instead. heh.

You know what? 10 million is not cool, but 1 billion is. Nowadays many apps already can exceed this many API requests. If you go with an open source and self-hosted solution, then you can have a billion events per month for free, on a modest Linux server. Have a look at Piwik and Countly for mobile & web analytics that. Both companies have a lot more on-prem options for a fraction of price of analytics companies ask for, due to the fact that they build their pricing on number of servers and not API calls.