CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan.
AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that.
For example, to run a CI server on Gitlab for a team of 8 that never spun down, it would cost $492 per month on their 'shared' runners. On AWS Code Build, you get a DEDICATED ec2 instance for $223 per month and only pay for what you use when it's running.
The setup time isn’t cheap, though, and the UI is... confusing.
If you’re using a dedicated ec2 instance, most providers (gitlab, buildkite, github, etc) will let you connect it as an agent for free.
IMO using your own runner is a better way to go in general because the standard ones tend to be very underpowered and you can get much faster builds without spending much.
At that point different providers are largely competing on price and UX (imo Buildkite have the best developer UX and the time saved as a result is well worth the price).
(Not affiliated with buildkite other than as a user).
You can install GitLab Runners on EC2. You can even GitLab install Runners on a Raspberry Pi or use some old computer and put it in a closet somewhere (uptime not guaranteed though).
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.
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!
Basically this definition works for venture-backed startups, who will fail or get big funding in 2 years. For those of us taking a slower, lower-risk path, two years is a pretty short cutoff for "startup" status.
If the entry-level, non-startup pricing were more modest, this wouldn't be much of an issue. But reading the comments about pricing here, it seems like the non-startup pricing is very high.
One of the characteristics I appreciate and look for most about software vendors is clear reasonable pricing. Temporary discounts, negotiated rates, applications, and the like push me away from products and make it much harder to sell what I want up the management chain.
I don’t recall the exact quote. We do have a ton of traffic (more so back then as it was a freemium product then). Not sure if it included their warehouse as well.
Our dev team at the time said rewriting it internally was impossible, so we actually paid it for 6 months. After changing the team, this was on the top of the list. It was trivial to switch.
Now, all the services that we used were stable so the benefit of easily adding and removing services was not something we needed.
Rightscale suffered similar fate when their rates kept going up. At some point it became cheaper to rewrite it ourselves.
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.
In terms of actually understanding how a hypothetical portfolio would have performed, something that is much more meaningful then the overall ROI provided by Google Finance is the concept of the annualised return.
We built our portfolio functionality with this in mind to empower investors to understand their true returns, respective of time. It often amazes users here at Australia's #1 stockmarket app, disclosure: I founded and bootstrapped the business and it's iOS/Android only at the moment.
I imagine it would depend a lot on what type of service you are offering and whether sales and marketing is something you can automate digitally for your business.
The economics behind this disruptive innovation in the steel industry were broken down really well by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in his writings and this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g
I had some pretty bad RSI that I thought was going to kill my career also.
Turned out, I managed to eliminate it by completely changing my keyboard technique to tuck my thumbs underneath my fingers when typing. I'm surprised no-one ever told me about this before.
The action of tapping the space bar with the corner of your thumbnail instead of smacking it with a big lateral thumb tap makes all the difference in reducing strain on your carpal tunnel.
If your arms are at rest beside your body while standing, the 'natural state' of your fingers and thumbs in this position is the exact same hand posture you should maintain when typing. If you are instead performing an up-down movement with an unbent thumb, that can lead to RSI problems.
The free version of Google Analytics gets capped at a certain volume of traffic whereas Firebase doesn't. That's definitely one motivating factor to make the switch.
I'll be interested to check it out when they get around to introducing Real-Time user stats to firebase. That's a pretty crucial component of analytics which I have open all the time.
Google contacted me to switch to firebase from analytics. Seems like they're putting a lot of effort into re-launching the firebase brand this year.
NativeScript looks really promising. My colleagues have used it for numerous client apps. It's not as mature as Appcelerator Titanium so it doesn't have as many plugins for advanced things like video recording or audio playback but if it continues to get traction, it could become a really good option.
Titanium has always been a pretty advanced product however ever since Appcelerator introduced it's licensing/arrow stuff, Titanium (and Alloy) uptake seems to have fallen off a cliff.
AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that.
For example, to run a CI server on Gitlab for a team of 8 that never spun down, it would cost $492 per month on their 'shared' runners. On AWS Code Build, you get a DEDICATED ec2 instance for $223 per month and only pay for what you use when it's running.