I don't really get it. Disclosure that I work at Looker which is an analytics company, though not really in the same space as Mixpanel. But I'm just confused about this latest trend of "you can get your data out!" from analytics providers that excel at one type of analysis (as Mixpanel does with funnels).

In my mind, the whole value of these providers is that they make that one kind of analysis really easy and pretty. But if you feel like you're outgrowing that and want to slice your data in new ways, I don't think you'd choose Mixpanel for their data capture alone, right? So is it just that the cost of Mixpanel is sunk and so might as well get the data they're already recording out?

It is simpler than that. I'm not slicing the data in different ways, I'm just centralizing what my whole team is looking at. We've spent too much time saying, "Hey look at the retention numbers, its so high!", "For when? I'm seeing it go low!"

You are what you measure, this had made it easy for us to centralize our data.

If you want an SQL like interface for Mixpabel data as well as other data sources, you might find Treasure Data useful. Here is a step by step guide that I wrote: https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2015/11/17/mixpanel-expor...

(Disclaimer: I work for Treasure Data. That said, there's also an open source way to do this with Embulk + many common SQL databases. See https://github.com/embulk)