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.
Took 1 day to rewrite.
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.
did you consider making it Open Source?
It's my favourite technology, but unaffordable for pretty much any company not burning some VCs money.
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.
It's worth a lot less than that to us.