Thanks for the feedback on pricing — it's definitely a work in progress (and we'll make the visual distinction clearer on our website). Our goal is to be as accessible as possible, so we're flexible with the plans right now. Pricing shouldn't be the reason that a team misses out on data issues.
When you sign up, you'll have access to everything immediately, so you can connect and try it out and when we start enforcing the limits, we'll give you ample notice.
I'm curious if you have opinions on the plans and pricing. Do the plans make sense as 1. individual 2. team for warehouse 3. team for whole stack 4. enterprise?
1) An integration with Metabase Cloud is on our roadmap for Q1! We'd love to integrate with Lightdash, but they don't have a public API just yet[1].
2) Several of our customers use us to alert on schema changes in Postgres, specifically so they can get ahead of application database changes that will end up in the warehouse, so you're definitely not alone! Here's a link on how to connect postgres: https://docs.metaplane.dev/docs/postgres
That's an excellent stack and one we kept front and center when building out Metaplane, so definitely let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions here!
My plan was to monitor the postgres database in the staging environment, so we can be alerted to schema changes before they are released into production (and hopefully stop the production deploy).
I have a goal of moving this even further upstream into the CI build for the source application itself (Ruby on Rails in this case), so that the application's test suite will fail a developer introduces a breaking schema change. Note: this is a pretty tricky problem to solve without a) the tests being way too brittle OR b) super slow end to end tests. I have some goals of introducing which is a mashup of: Spectacles [1], Pact [2], and dbt models [3].
That sounds like a great plan. We're planning to build our public API and CI/CD integrations early next year, so that developers can know what the downstream impact of their changes might be, and whether it could introduce unexpected results. We may be able to slot right in there with Pact.
Mitigating the impact with monitoring is where we're at right now, but we're with you that preventing errors can be even more important.
If it's interesting to you, we're happy to open up a shared slack channel to dig into the nuance as well! Just email me (guru@metaplane.dev) with the email you'd like to be added.
When Nick Schrock created dagster, he argued that many "data cleaning" tasks which people attribute to "data engineering" aren't actually "cleaning", but are architecture problems. I believe schema changes also fall into this category. I'm extremely new to data engineering, but when I think about "What are the things which will break this system?" an application engineer thinking "I'm going to rename this column and my tests pass, so this should be fine" will break things all the time. (Similar goes for dropping a column, changing a one-to-many into a many-to-many)
Hightouch user here. HT actually has a lot of that - git integration [0], visual segmentation [1].
Not sure about self-hosting though. Open-source is cool, will check it out.
Haha thanks. Love some friendly competition :). In all seriousness, though we're focusing elsewhere, the OSS angle is cool.
If you're interested in self-hosted though, just reach out at hello@hightouch.io.
That said, IMO one of the coolest parts of our tech is our "hybrid architecture". Out of the box, no data is stored in Hightouch - it's all in your cloud (warehouse, s3 bucket). This is how fintech (Plaid, Blend, Betterment, + some banks now!) and healthcare brands like Headway use us. We've also done a ton of compliance work and have certificates for SOC2 Type II and whanot.
There are probably some nuances one level down. Things our users have told us they can do in these areas that, to my knowledge, Hightouch doesn't do:
* Combine data from different sources to define a model. We'v seen using Postgres as a source of truth and supplementing with Snowflake data, for example.
* Add tags to contacts in mailchimp, zendesk or make lists of them in customer.io, Pardot, etc based on segmentation. I believe Hightouch Audiences is more like a filter.
* Full workflow with branches, PRs, test suite in a repo. I saw Hightouch added git syncing to a known branch yesterday and it looks cool, but it's not the full workflow yet.
I'm certainly trying to keep it in the friendly-competition area, especially on this thread :-)
This probably isn't the best place for an extended comparison, but since it's our launch post, I'll try to close the thread with a couple corrections for factuality. If anyone is interested in a deep-dive, email hello@hightouch.io, and I'm happy to set one up personally. And, I'm sure the team at Grouparoo would be willing to do the same ("contact us" at bottom of their website).
* Add tags to contacts in mailchimp, zendesk or make lists of them in customer.io, Pardot, etc based on segmentation. I believe Hightouch Audiences is more like a filter.
With static mappings, audiences can be synced to destinations as tags :). The magic is in the abstractions, not features!
* Full workflow with branches, PRs, test suite in a repo. I saw Hightouch added git syncing to a known branch yesterday and it looks cool, but it's not the full workflow yet.
Lots more coming soon here. Our git integration is bidirectional so you can totally do that stuff in git, but UI support is on the way. We've found the UI experience is a lot better of an experience than code for _most_ Reverse ETL workflows... so I see the value in this - I'lll check it out
If I have to be honest, the biggest thing that customers love about our product is that it works and accomplishes their use cases. Platform features are cool, but from time to time, I have to remind myself that Fivetran has proven that integrations and actually working comes first, and it is volume but not _just_ volume... our philosophy (destinations as a product), design, and progress there is quite differentiated from the space. You can read more in our Series A announcement from a few months ago at https://hightouch.io/blog/series-a
PS: I haven't tried Grouparoo in a while. I do love the concepts, will give it a swing!
The Salesforce data is in Salesforce, and the HubSpot data is in HubSpot, and the Mixpanel data is in Mixpanel, but those applications don't have each others data (not to mention missing any transformations on top). E.g. As a sales rep, you can benefit from understanding product usage and marketing activity for a contact in salesforce
Thanks for mentioning this! I've also been looking to donate to Sri Lankan charities in the north-east but it has been difficult to understand which charities are still operating and have a legitimate impact.
We donated to six charities and I ended up learning a lot (from a position of significant ignorance) about the charity landscape. I was shocked to find out that $33 per month can fund a full undergrad scholarship for a student.
I was particularly impressed/interested in this non-profit that acts as a coding school and accelerator: http://www.yarlithub.org/
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
