Comment by curun1r
7 years ago
Heh...I had the opposite reaction to the price. As someone building something in the analytics space, $12/mo seems so low that it won't get traction beyond the hobbyist demographic. If you want to sell to business, the price point needs to be at least $200/mo.
Plus, I have zero confidence that someone using a naive postgres implementation can scale an analytics backend with customers paying only $12/mo unless all those customers get barely any traffic. Perhaps if he was using Timescale on top of postgres, but even then, $12/mo seems awfully low.
But as it is, the price point signals that he doesn't think it's a particularly valuable service.
How do you know the postgres implementation is naive? I've worked on several analytics platforms...including offshoots of google analytics within Google itself, and this problem domain is ridiculously easy to shard on natural partitions. And after sharding, you can start to do roll-ups, which Google Analytics does internally.
By 2014 when I left, we had a few petabytes of analytics data for a very small but high traffic set of customers. Could we query all of that at once within a reasonable online SLA? No. We partitioned and sharded the data easily and only queried the partitions we needed.
If I were to do this now and didn't need near real-time (what is real-time?) I'd use sqlite. Otherwise I'ld use trickle-n-flip on postgres or mysql. There are literally 10+ year-old books[1] on this wrt RDBMS.
And yes, even with 2000 clients reaching billions of requests per day, only the top few stressed the system. The rest is long tail.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Data-Warehousing-Handbook-Rob-Mattiso...
There's a comment elsewhere in this thread where he talks about his backend. He didn't explicitly say it was naive, but he definitely gave off that vibe. Is it possible to use postgres in a sophisticated way to work as an analytics store? Sure...Timescale does it and gives you the majority of what you'd need. But it's hard to get right and the creator hasn't given the impression that he's well-versed in this space.
It's an MVP right? Nothing stopping him from changing the model in the future