Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

http://blog.airbrake.io/airbrake-news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake-first-met/

by asktell • 14 years ago

67 31 14 years ago

blog.airbrake.io

Croaky• 14 years ago

More on the acquisition from the thoughtbot blog: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/17212734809/airbrake-acqui...

I'm extremely sad to hear about this development. Jon Siegel has a seriously bad track record of running startups into the ground. I've used both Exceptional and Hoptoad (Airbrake) extensively, but I had to switch every app I run to Airbrake because Exceptional has been stagnant for nearly a year. They obviously don't care about the product and now they'll ruin Airbrake too. :(

Kudos• 14 years ago

According to Thoughtbot's post, Exceptional has been running Airbrake for months now.

jerhinesmith• 14 years ago

I'm interested to see where this goes next. I feel like Airbrake hasn't gotten much love lately, and there are multiple times during the day where the response times are abysmal.

Here's hoping the new stewardship brings some better architecture/hardware and some new features.

benarent2• 14 years ago

I'm happy to be a part of the new Airbrake + Exceptional team. I'll be heading up the product, UX and community events . We've already taken huge steps in improve the exception developer workflow and will be launching much needed search, notification workflow and integrations to Airbrake in the coming months. We are going to officially support more languages, and better support mobile exception tracking.

We are still working out our Exceptional + Airbrake roadmap; but if you have any questions or concerns please e-mail myself at ben@exceptional.io .

If you prefer Sans Serif, check out the exceptional blog. http://blog.exceptional.io/news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake...

On a side note; it's been a pleasure working with the Thoughtbot + Contrast team.

eric35• 14 years ago

lately they've just raised the airbrake prices to more than 600% WITHOUT ANY NOTICE! I see that exceptional cost 9 usd/month (per project or account? it's not clear) I'll see what they'll do, and eventually migrate to an open alternative. 5 usd/month for 4 projects is great, 35 usd/month it isn't (speaking for a bootstrapping startup where every cent can make the difference)

benarent2• 14 years ago

Hi this is Ben. I run all things product. I take full responsibility for outages and our pricing change and I'd like to share what we're thinking--and I'm happy to have constructive feedback.

We have regular usage of 3000+ requests per second between our products. We have 12+ languages/frameworks that feed us exceptions. We also have integrations with PaaS providers like Heroku, EngineYard, AppFog and others. We also get hundreds of support requests each week. Part of our mission for embracing both of these products is to complete a vision that includes many powerful additions. But to get there we knew we needed to both retool the architecture for scale. We also wanted to keep under 24 hour turnaround time for our support.

When you look at our historical pricing there is no way we could meet our expectations of providing high reliability to our customers, a high quality of support and maintain all the bits that feed into the product--not to mention our vision for the future.

We tested our pricing changes with over a hundred of our users and they adamantly agreed--charge us more--make it rock solid--and let's see some of those features (e.g. search!).

And in general--our philosophy with pricing is this: we are developers. All of our customers are developers. But within this group there is a distinction--the side-project developer and the corporate developer. You are probably a corporate developer when you've advanced to having a company credit card. To you, our pricing is trivial for a production infrastructure service (see AWS or even Salesforce and friends). For the side-project developer--we are never going to be inexpensive enough. And we don't want to break your back to get great service from us! In fact, if anyone has been adversely affected by our plans, you should tell me! I take responsibility and want to hear from you.

I'm ben@airbrake.io or just give me a call at 415 500 5207. Although I'm in Berlin right now with some of our awesome users http://instagr.am/p/GtrfVDlnsy/, so if my speech is slurred or I'm slow to respond this evening, you know why. :-)

meta0• 14 years ago

Whoa! The cheapest Airbrake account costs $79! Are there alternatives to Airbrak & Exceptional?

rubynerd• 14 years ago

https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new?dev=true

You missed the small link at the bottom of the pricing grid

snprbob862• 14 years ago

Weird... it was $5/mo when we signed up less than a year ago. Seems that our price hasn't changed. That said, we're moving away from it.

Why? Well, it's practically useless outside of Ruby. The UX assumes Rack/Rails-isms, so the experience is weird for Javascript errors. Beyond that, stack traces aren't good enough to debug many issues; you need logging integration. This is especially true for minified javascript.

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

What are you moving to?

dedene2• 14 years ago

Does anyone have any experience with http://atechmedia.com/exceptions ? It seems to be free and compatible with the Airbrake (Hoptoad) API.

nathan_f776• 14 years ago

That looks alright, but they really won't last very long without charging. Error catching services are very expensive to run.

Errbit (https://github.com/errbit/errbit) is an open source and free alternative, which is self-hosted. It's also compatible with the Airbrake API.

It's easy to set up in a few minutes, either on heroku, or on your own server. As well as being free, you can store your potentially private data in-house, and customize and integrate it as much as you want.

nathan_f776• 14 years ago

Errbit is an awesome self-hosted, open source alternative - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

It's compatible with the Airbrake API, so you just need to configure the Airbrake Notifier gem to point to your Errbit instance.

aneth• 14 years ago

Is there a reason to use any of these services given how trivial it is to set up an open source alternative? You can push errbit to heroku in 5 minutes and you're done.

Perhaps there is a level of service here and a business I don't see, and I'm a huge heroku and third party service user, but I don't see the need for a monthly service fee to aggregate and send exception notifications. It's either a self deploy or a feature of an overall monitoring service like NewRelic.

jballanc• 14 years ago

Having used Airbrake (when it was Hoptoad), Exceptional, email notifiers, NewRelic, and "rolling your own", I would say that there is definitely value in having a service to handle this for you.

Rolling your own is more effort than it's worth. On top of that, exception tracking is not something you want to have to worry about when your world comes crashing down, and that's exactly when a hand-rolled solution is most likely to fail. (i.e. Are you running your hand-rolled tracker in the same Heroku instance as your app? Then how do you know what went wrong when your app comes down? Are you running it as a separate Heroku instance? Why are you wasting money/resources running twice as many instances as you need?)

NewRelic is nice in the way that it integrates with other charting/reporting for your app. However, on a day-to-day basis, too many errors/exceptions are not caught by NewRelic making it ultimately unreliable. Also, you don't get nearly enough context with error reports to be able to debug the root cause (though they have been improving in this regard).

Email fails as a solution the first time you accidentally deploy an error that gets hit 500 times a second. This is especially true if your app, itself, needs to send emails. I've witnessed a situation where exception email notifications have caused message rate-limiting to kick in preventing customer targeted emails from being sent. Now you have two problems!

I won't say that Airbrake or Exceptional are perfect, but they are good for what they do. Obviously every situation is different, and you have to weigh the pros and cons (e.g. How much traffic are you receiving? Do you have a dedicated Ops team that can handle deploying/maintaining a hand-rolled solution? How much revenue are you loosing because of exceptions? Is your app targeting individuals that are likely to be turned off the first time they see a 500 page? or can you afford to have uncaught exceptions for now?). By no means, though, would I dismiss these solutions out of hand.

Vitaly• 14 years ago

It all depends on how much you value your own time. It never takes just 5 min. And over the course of a year it migh easily take hour(s) of development time that is better spent on improving you product.

Heroku does the same thing for example. They are quite expensive if you compare them to running on raw ec2, but when you factor in the time that you need to spend to build and maintain your own infrastructure Heroku "suddenly" looks like a very good deal.

nathan_f776• 14 years ago

Errbit can literally be set up in 5 or 10 minutes. Either on Heroku or on your own server. And if you are currently using Airbrake in your Rails app, all you need to do is add one line to your config, and it's done.

That's a great point about Heroku though - there should definitely be an open source EC2 framework that provides a similar infrastructure...

ctide• 14 years ago

You can use Airbrake for free (https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new/Free), and it takes about 3 minutes to setup and you don't have to think about it. Sure, you don't get automatic deploy notifications built into Capistrano, but I've certainly upgraded my Airbrake plan for various apps in the past and will do it again.

Why would I want to concern myself with maintaining another app when I can just use Airbrake?

18pfsmt• 14 years ago

Not being aware of Airbrake prior, I assumed it was a service for transcoding media (i.e. Handbrake in the 'cloud'). Upon learning its actual purpose, it seems like the project is yet-another-candidate for cloning in an open source project so people can it run on their own.

As a hobbyist looking to learn more, I have been making a list of services that I could clone the functionality of, in an open source project, to achieve that end. This looks like a good opportunity.

nathan_f776• 14 years ago

I'm a core contributor to Errbit, which is exactly this :) - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

We run it at our organization to monitor 11 applications. One of the major benefits was LDAP authentication, and a custom issue tracker integration.

dedene2• 14 years ago

Is anyone else getting confused too? who did acquired who?

On http://contrast.ie/ is stated Exceptional is acquired by Airbrake.io (Hoptoad). And here is state the opposite... will Exceptional continue to exist or Airbrake? Or Both?

chriswarren• 14 years ago

I believe Exceptional was acquired by Jon Siegel, and then Exceptional, under its new ownership, acquired Airbrake. I haven't seen anything that indicates which brand will take precedence or if both will continue running.

cheald• 14 years ago

Sounds like it might be time for me to roll a service like this. I used to use Exceptional, but their free plan went away, and I switched to just using exception_notifier to send emails straight to me instead. It's a useful service, but the price point just doesn't work for hobby/small projects.

nathan_f776• 14 years ago

You might want to check out Errbit, which is a free and open source alternative that can be set up in minutes. https://github.com/errbit/errbit

ztravis• 14 years ago

Small stylistic comment: the busy background on quotes makes the text very difficult to read!

jfeldstein2• 14 years ago

How will the acquisition affect the release of the much-needed javascript exception tracking upgrades?

andrewnez• 14 years ago

Errbit (https://github.com/errbit/errbit) is the open source alternative to Airbrake/Hoptoad that provides an identical API so you can continue to use the same gem in your projects, just point it at a different service.

The problem with being a customer on airbrake/exceptional is that you end up paying for crappy customers that send millions of exceptions to their servers putting them under heavy load, if you have a low traffic app then err bit on a free heroku account is a hassle free way of handling exceptions.

matthewcford• 14 years ago

We host a number of low traffic apps on staging our servers, that would push us into the $999/month plan. Which is like 2-3 times as much as we pay for the servers... So for us errbit is worth the time it takes to setup.

Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

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