I really shouldn't be building this myself. But looking at these prices for mixpanel and kissmetrics, they seem out of whack-- great for profitable businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups. Plus what if you need between 25,000 and 500,000 data points per month with mixpanel? That's a huge gulf and you go from free to $150 a month?<p>Some startups start with large customer bases but operate at a relatively low margin per customer (because its extremely cheap to serve each customer.) For instance, for $250 a month in hosting[1], I can service tens of millions of customers, but buying either of these services for that many customers would cost a lot more than the hosting.<p>Looking at real world metrics for one of my apps I'm currently collecting enough data points (for free using Flurry) that to use mix panel would cost a sizable (%15-%20) of the apps monthly revenue.<p>I'm not saying they're not worth it-- I'm sure they are. I just don't see a way for a startup to onramp here. Our primary burn is keeping us housed and fed, operations are being kept as cheap as possible until we have real revenue. $150 is a lot. (though kiss metrics has a $30 and $80 plans which alone means we're more likely to use them.)<p>[1] in part because hetzner's XE 4S servers are such a screaming deal- that's about 5 32GB servers.