Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. As a Google Fiber customer in Austin, it honestly wasn't any better than any of the other ISPs. Ironically, the only thing that was better was the DVR and live TV search that came with the TV service.
9 karma · joined December 14, 2011
You should check them out: https://www.graphiq.com
If you don't mind writing some boilerplate JS to capture things like Device, Location, etc, then you could really just all of the events straight to the lambda function via Amazon's API Gateway. This would save anywhere from $100/mo to $2k a month.
The only downside to this approach is that we had to define our analytics schema early on in the process in order to have it match up with the redshift database. If you went with elastic search instead of redshift you would probably gain some flexibility in the schema (but at the cost of a normalized dataset to wire up in Tableau or some other BI tool).
I would also be very interested to hear if anyone's used Amazon's BI service (Quicksight?) or other tools like Looker or Periscope.
As long as you're aware of the potential business risks and are taking at least some steps to mitigate it (or have plans to), you might as well keep adding as much value as possible to further position yourself in whatever market you're playing in.
Focus on the value add, and if you start to reach a scale where pricing becomes prohibitive, great! Now build your own.
If their API changes, well, that's a bit harder to handle. The second you start to see any level of serious traction you'll probably want to either a) lock down a long term contract or b) build a replacement that frees you from this dependancy.