David Cramer

Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.

... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.

We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.

To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this?

... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on…

I have written quite a lot on my personal blog about our decisions and been very transparent. In particular, the decision on switching to BUSL orgininally I talk about here:

https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor

Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an affordable and well crafted product. Our distribution model - and in general our approach to affordability - is key to that, but the freedoms of open source software are less so.

For clarity, VC has never had anything to do with it, but we are certainly ambitious. Our singular goal from a product point of view is adoption, and we ensure that via accessibility and affordability. From a competitor point of view I personally think we've done better than most could dream of wrt marketshare. Companies like SigNoz don't compete with us today, and projects like GlitchTip don't even register on the market. Our competition these days is the fuzzy areas of the APM venn diagram like Datadog, New Relic, etc.

Neat! I checked out your source code, and if there's one comment I have, it's the way you query for comments. Currently, response times are around 300-400 ms for just 79 bytes of data. That's likely because you recursively fetch nested comments from a serverless function, which potentially has to make multiple network request to talk to the database. Coincidentally, a past Disqus employee has a great write up on the faster solution (recursive CTE): https://cra.mr/2010/05/30/scaling-threaded-comments-on-django-at-disqus/

Regardless, great work! Choosing Svelte to hit that 4.7kb mark is super sweet!