Heap
Web and SaaS
web analytics
SHOW HN2013
339points
201comments
#25of 1,739 in 2013
Top 2%of 2013 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
18 positive, 48 neutral or asking, 5 mixed, 40 critical, out of 111 comments about the project. Thread score -0.17.
Pricing: 3 for, 12 againstIdea: 5 for, 5 againstExecution: 2 for, 8 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 8 againstPerformance: 1 for, 4 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Retroactive analysis and capturing everything without pre-defined events
From 3 comments
Great job! I think other analytics platforms will start to follow suit as more people start to realise that it's cheap enough to just mercilessly capture every user event. The UI…
Cakez0r on HNthis sounds really awesome if they can manage to stay up under heavy load. It's such a huge pain to set up and maintain the tracking of events in application code. Having…
czzarr on HNThis looks great. I was looking in the docs and you even have a way to track purchases/revenue and identify users. In addition, the fact that you're able to associate identity…
namabile on HN
Clean, intuitive UI
From 1 comment
Great job! I think other analytics platforms will start to follow suit as more people start to realise that it's cheap enough to just mercilessly capture every user event. The UI…
Cakez0r on HN
Objections
Pricing is too high for small or high-traffic low-value sites
From 4 comments
Cool service, but the pricing is insanely high. My piddly website gets 100k uniques a month, which would cost $600 to track. Kraaaazy.
krazydad on HNlooks great but you should take a look at your pricing structure! pricing is extremely difficult so I don't mean to over-criticise, the thing is that you've basically priced…
lingben on HNThis seems really interesting, but starting at 250 users per month seems high. I notice the price/active user starts at a penny and falls 60% as the users climb to over 500,000.…
AaronFriel on HNWow this is pretty amazing and something I wish google had offered for awhile. The one area where I think your going to need to work on is your pricing. It's just to high for…
anonfunction on HN
Privacy concerns about collecting all user activity
From 3 comments
Welcome to the blacklist. I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not…
huhtenberg on HNGreat technology, but you guys will know a lot about my business and my users and I'd like to be convinced that you won't do ill with this data...not that I don't trust you, but…
bertomartin on HNLooks nice. I do worry about the privacy implications of analytics like this. I'm also pretty sure that this doesn't fly in Europe... something to consider perhaps!
jstsch on HN
Performance impact of logging every event is unclear
From 3 comments
Looks very cool––what kind of performance hit is introduced by logging every event?
Jasber on HNWhat are the performance implications on, say, a javascript web application?
endlessvoid94 on HNI'm obviously outside of the audience this is for, and probably most other commenters since only one other person mentioned performance. Perf?? And of course, this follows the…
reddiric on HN
Does not support IE8 and older browsers
From 3 comments
Windows user here. The fonts on your site do not render well on Windows machines. I see an increasing number of sites using embedded fonts that, for whatever reason, render…
meritt on HNThe demo page (https://heapanalytics.com/dashboard/demo) fails in IE8. Is it just me or IE8 is just not considered by web startups anymore ? Sorry to deviate a little but every…
codegeek on HNIt's not your imagination. For Heap, it would be a bit unwise to ignore IE < 9 still since they're limiting themselves from the start. A lot of new projects on the front page…
eksith on HN
Requests
Integrate with Analytics.js
From 2 comments
You should integrate with Analytics.js... https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js
philfreo on HNPlease integrate with Analytics.js!
philfreo on HN
Beta access or invite without request form
From 2 comments
I would love to use this product! I was talking with my team recently about having product similar to heap and we've used bunch of analytics products in the past. @Founders of…
dm8 on HNWhy do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
nostromo on HN
Cheaper tier for small sites
From 2 comments
This seems really interesting, but starting at 250 users per month seems high. I notice the price/active user starts at a penny and falls 60% as the users climb to over 500,000.…
AaronFriel on HNDoes it also offers cohort abalysis based on the time of a particular event (not just a particular property like Browser)? eg. filter everyone that signed up at the first week of…
soneca on HN
Questions
How is the data stored and what is the stack
From 2 comments
Looks great! I'm mostly intrigued by the ad-hoc Group By query functionality. Traditionally that's an indicator of some sort of relational database on the backend, but is that…
vyrotek on HNCan you discuss how you address the "schema-on-read" problem? One of the downsides of the cheap bit-bucket approach of tech like NoSQL and Hadoop is that it's easy to get the…
bravura on HN
What happens to costs on traffic spikes
From 1 comment
What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?
azov on HN
How are clicks and scroll events and event naming handled
From 3 comments
Does Heap track event streams like mouse position and scrolling? The storage overhead would be significantly larger than instantaneous events like clicks, but this data would be…
pnt on HNI imagine that your event feed is going to get pretty unwieldy if you have a thousand events named like the following: ``` div.star.empty button.btn.btn-primary…
physcab on HNClosing the lightbox doesn't stop YouTube, fyi. Also, can you handle scrolls?
randall on HN
Alternatives named
KISSmetrics
From 2 comments
Welcome to the blacklist. I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not…
huhtenberg on HNI liked it very much as a non-tech founder that is not quite sure how to define some events on KissMetrics and regret not having qualified a particular form of sign up as an…
soneca on HN
Mixpanel and Segment.io
From 1 comment
It's ironic that on their website they don't have their own code (well, maybe it's on the backend) and use Segment.io + Mixpanel instead.
isalmon on HN
Google Analytics or Urchin
From 2 comments
Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])? My…
k3n on HNHope your sites don't have dialup or mobile over 2G users. ever.
gcb0 on HN
Chartbeat
From 1 comment
I can speak to this a little bit, actually. Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider…
Hovertruck on HN