TelemetryDeck Summer Update 2026 (diary of a SaaS founder)
July was one long struggle. So many extra commitments to juggle alongside our day-to-day business, like school summer festivals, sports club farewell parties, and conferences. And all of this during an unprecedented heat wave. I’m incredibly proud of how we’ve fought our way through the last few weeks, both as a company and as a family.
Here in Germany, August is traditionally a quiet month, since many people take their annual vacation during this time, meaning many contacts at companies are unavailable. There are hardly any business events, and I have far fewer meetings on my calendar because our team is also taking its well-deserved break.
That’s why August is the time for me to focus on strategic issues. I can finally spend more than 30 minutes undisturbed exploring a topic and building houses of cards in my head. That’s why I’ve set my sights high.
Hello-goodbye: analyzing churn
We’re going to analyze our churn more closely. That means, for one thing, we’ve started taking a closer look at accounts that had a paid plan with us and canceled it. To do this, we’ll examine the multiple-choice answers some users select, but we’ll also look for other patterns, such as usage or the age of the accounts.
Historically, our churn rate has always been low. That has changed recently. For now, this isn’t something that worries us greatly, since we’re living in turbulent times and developers are constantly having to reevaluate how they allocate their limited budgets. However, we want to understand in which areas we can offer an even better and more valuable service to help app developers build great apps in the long term. (Also, if you have opinions on how we can make you as a customer happier, please totally reach out to our support email address. <3 )
AI visibility in different stages of user funnels
My second major strategic focus is on our content. That is, everything TelemetryDeck publishes at all levels. I’m currently conducting a detailed analysis to determine which touch points developers have with TelemetryDeck and what information is available at each stage. For example, someone who’s just starting to think about adding an analytics SDK to their app needs different information than someone who’s dissatisfied with their analytics provider’s funnel analytics feature and is therefore looking for an alternative.
Such processes are increasingly being managed in collaboration with LLMs, as many developers turn to Claude and other models for advice on their tech stack. That’s why it’s my job to ensure that the LLMs can find all the necessary information about us so they can recommend us to the right developers at each stage of their development journey.
Product News
In our newsletter, we share all the little things we’re working on so our loyal readers can stay up-to-date. We share the major milestones we’re working on (or will be working on) here.
Making more efficient use of existing resources
We started to automatically deactivate accounts that haven’t been active for over 12 months. This means these organizations won’t cause any load on our servers. This is crucial since we are working hard on keeping the costs low for everyone. We also hope to reactivate some of these users since checking out the usage data of your app is pretty cool.
The new TelemetryDeck MCP is out (beta)
We’ve released a beta version of our MCP server, allowing LLMs like Claude to access TelemetryDeck data. There were some stumbling stones in the first days since we misconfigured the authorization. Thanks to everyone who wrote in and made us aware of the problem.
Since this is solved, we hear a lot of positive feedback. Bonus: actively supporting an MCP will also increase our discoverability with search engines and LLMs.
A glimpse into our roadmap
When you are reading this post, chances are that you are a founder or developer (or both) yourself. Therefore, I am pretty sure you have the same situation as us: too many ideas, tickets, and features. Our roadmap has around 20 entries and gives us a great utilization of the workforce units until May 2029 (estimated). Today, I want to share the two entries that excite me the most.
- We continue to improve our onboarding process. We believe we can do an even better job of making the registration process super fast so that new customers can start working with their data in no time. At the same time, we intend to make a few changes that should drastically reduce the number of fake accounts. This problem has become ridiculously huge because of AI, and we need to take action to address it.
- We’re already working on supporting the new version of MetricKit that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026. In addition to the great new capabilities MetricKit offers, we’re of course thrilled that the presentation specifically highlighted the important role of analytics services, which are essential for working with the data. We were listening closely, Apple!
Our pricing update went well, and we are grateful to have such a fantastic customer base
Looking back on our price increase in July, we’re very pleased with the results. There were a few cancellations and very few complaints. Plus, we manually processed and adjusted a few edge cases. But overall everything went smoothly. It’s great to see that we have customers who’ve been with us for so long that they were still grandfathered into the price before the last.
Thanks to our new, more affordable Indie Plan, significantly more of our customers have decided to switch to a paid plan. That was the goal: to provide more customers with fantastic features like personal access tokens and real-time data.
Nerding around on stage on digital independence day
Have you heard of Digital Independence Day? It was launched by the hacker organization Chaos Computer Club in early 2026. On the first Sunday of every month, experts and interested individuals meet to help each other discover open-source-based services or privacy-friendly alternative software.
At Digital Independence Day in August, I was invited to give a talk on the necessity of Europe’s digital independence. I had an incredible time, and I was also very proud that my child came along and got along great with the other nerds. 5 stars. I’d love to go again!
📸 Melina Oppelt
Hot topic
I don’t know what the situation is like in the country where you live, but I suspect it’s similar to here in Germany: climate protection has repeatedly been pushed to the back burner because economic interests took precedence. Now it can no longer be denied that this was a very foolish strategy.
In Germany, major waterways used for shipping are becoming impassable because water levels are too low. Huge wildfires are destroying farmland, tourist attractions, and residential areas across Europe. Several countries are announcing that they have to reduce the output of or shut down their nuclear power plants because of a lack of cooling water. And in our team meetings, the heat is the dominant topic (hardly anyone can sleep well).
Unfortunately, climate change is difficult to stop on our own, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the complexity and gravity of the issue. I want to assure you: You’re not alone. There are many people who care, who are fighting, making their case, and making things better.
I don’t want to appeal to individual responsibility, because I believe it really doesn’t matter whether you drink your soda through a glass straw or a plastic straw. But I’d like to encourage you to become an amplifier. Support the initiatives in your neighborhood that focus on restoring natural vegetation to previously paved areas. Sign the petition for better bike lanes in your city. And before the next election, find out where climate protection ranks on the candidates’ list of priorities.
On our side, we’re taking care to use sustainable data centers that are powered by hydropower.
There are many of us. Keep on doing the right things.