I’ve used a few different analytics services before and didn’t find them very difficult to set up. So it’s hard for me to see the value segment provides. I suspect it might be for companies that are less eng-focused than a typical Silicon Valley startup. Does your engineering org use segment? If so, why? What value does it add?
My startup is a seed-stage Segment alternative with a different pricing model (event based vs MTU based). If you're only using a few client side integrations and you don't mind tweaking and updating those snippets by hand then I would say there's not much value add. Once you're mixing client side across multiple platforms and server side too to 5-10 different destinations and maybe a data warehouse like Redshift you will really appreciate not writing all of that code. Building the core of a high availability streaming pipeline that scales with logging, monitoring, support, etc really is harder than it sounds. More importantly it's a massive distraction from building your product for most companies. If you go with Astronomer over Segment, we also have enterprise installs you can run inside your cloud or in on prem if you're too big for SaaS etc. Lots of the code is open source on GitHub.
i used it at my last place. it has its quirks but if you’re trying to get event data into s3 or redshift it gets the job done. also helpful for pulling fb ads, stripe, etc... integrations into redshift as well. I’d pose the opposite question. if that functionality isn’t part of your company’s core value prop, why isn’t your first instinct to outsource that task? you can probably do it better if you try, but now your team needs to maintain it. and it’s etl so it spends a fair amount of time busted
Hmm, good point about Redshift. I didn’t know Segment did that.