This is very good information for us. This poll is part of our "is this a marketable idea" phase. It will help us decide if we should focus only on these tools for our products, or if we should design it for use by other applications through the API.
I had my reservations about people being willing to rely on an external service for this type of functionality, but it sounds like the bigger concern is more of value and utility. This should help us work towards the right design.
FWIW, I personally have no trouble relying on external services, provided that they are reputable and unlikely to disappear or otherwise let us down. As we're in the UK and many such services are abroad, legal action is never likely to be relevant here, so trust is everything.
You are quite right that I am far more interested in the cost/benefit question. To give you a specific example, we could build a monthly credit card billing system ourselves, using nothing but a payment gateway and merchant account. However, we know this would be painful, since anything to do with handling credit cards in-house is painful anyway, and setting up a robust system to do that would take a huge amount of development time that we would rather invest in our service. Thus we are seriously evaluating a small number of automated billing services, and fully expect to use one or other of them provided we can set up the pricing plans we need on their system by launch time.
On the other hand, we are unlikely to use Google Analytics. Leaving aside the "It's Google"/privacy concerns, I just don't find it particularly powerful or easy to use. On the other other hand, a good analytics system for our purposes, which could be integrated with our back-end database code to get whatever source data we want to evaluate but handle all the maths/pretty pictures/etc. easily, would be of substantial value to us. I'm not sure whether this is the sort of thing you have in mind, which at this point is a problem for both of us. ;-)
Comments
This is very good information for us. This poll is part of our "is this a marketable idea" phase. It will help us decide if we should focus only on these tools for our products, or if we should design it for use by other applications through the API.
I had my reservations about people being willing to rely on an external service for this type of functionality, but it sounds like the bigger concern is more of value and utility. This should help us work towards the right design.
FWIW, I personally have no trouble relying on external services, provided that they are reputable and unlikely to disappear or otherwise let us down. As we're in the UK and many such services are abroad, legal action is never likely to be relevant here, so trust is everything.
You are quite right that I am far more interested in the cost/benefit question. To give you a specific example, we could build a monthly credit card billing system ourselves, using nothing but a payment gateway and merchant account. However, we know this would be painful, since anything to do with handling credit cards in-house is painful anyway, and setting up a robust system to do that would take a huge amount of development time that we would rather invest in our service. Thus we are seriously evaluating a small number of automated billing services, and fully expect to use one or other of them provided we can set up the pricing plans we need on their system by launch time.
On the other hand, we are unlikely to use Google Analytics. Leaving aside the "It's Google"/privacy concerns, I just don't find it particularly powerful or easy to use. On the other other hand, a good analytics system for our purposes, which could be integrated with our back-end database code to get whatever source data we want to evaluate but handle all the maths/pretty pictures/etc. easily, would be of substantial value to us. I'm not sure whether this is the sort of thing you have in mind, which at this point is a problem for both of us. ;-)