Today's Deep-Dive: Dittofeed

Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we're really diving into the ROI of open

source,

specifically in your marketing stack. And we're focusing pretty intently on DittoFeed.

It's this

platform that's making some big promises about ending, well, the hitting costs of

vendor lock-in

and those rising prices for customer communication. Our mission today, especially

for you, the learner

listening in, is to really pull apart how a platform like DittoFeed gives you that

crucial

escape hatch from expensive systems. We're going to break down the features,

journeys,

embedded components, all that stuff. So anyone, really, whether you're a CTO or

maybe a marketing

specialist, can get the technical benefits and just the sheer flexibility it offers.

Flexibility really is the key word, isn't it? When we talk about customer

engagement, what we mean is

the whole infrastructure that automates, well, pretty much every message between a

business

and its users. That covers the marketing side, think newsletters, those onboarding

campaigns,

and also the transactional stuff, you know, receipts, password resets, appointment

reminders,

all those critical messages. And Data Feed's goal here is quite straightforward, be

that

comprehensive omni-channel layer, so handling email, SMS, and more. And crucially,

doing it

as a genuinely developer-friendly and, well, sustainable alternative to the big

proprietary

names like, say, customer.io. Okay, before we really unpack this whole open-source

angle,

which sounds fascinating, we need to give a quick shout out to the supporter of

this deep dive,

Safe Server. Safe Server handles software hosting, and they support your digital

transformation

journey. They make sure your, you know, complex infrastructure is solid and

reliable. And they

specifically help with hosting software just like Ditto Feed. You can find out much

more about how

they can support you at www.safeserver.de. So big thanks to Safe Server for

supporting us.

Now let's get back to those core problems you mentioned, especially that threat of

vendor lock-in. For businesses may be burned by older providers, what does that

trap actually

look like day to day? Oh, it looks like paralysis really. Vendor lock-in, it

happens when the cost

and the sheer complexity of moving all your user data, your messaging setups away

from one platform

just becomes, well, prohibitive, too expensive, too risky. So you end up stuck. You're

often paying

these ever-increasing fees based on volume because the operational headache, the

risk of actually

moving is just too high. Right. And what's really interesting here is how DittoFeed

tackles this

head-on using that open source philosophy. It's not just software. It feels more

like an insurance

policy. Exactly. That's a great way to put it. They actually call it the escape

hatch. See,

DittoFeed is MIT licensed, the source code, completely open, totally free. So users

can

start with their cloud offering, which is super convenient for getting up and

running fast.

But crucially, if they ever face aggressive price hikes or maybe their compliance

needs change,

they have a clear documented way to switch to self-hosting it themselves.

And this is important. They actually provide technical support to help with that

transition.

Okay. But let's be real for a second. When you trade volume-based pricing for self-hosting,

aren't you potentially swapping one kind of headache for another? I mean, managing

infrastructure like Clickhouse and Temporal, that's not trivial, right? What's the

real trade-off?

That's a really important question. The trade-off is definitely management

complexity, yes,

but what you gain is ultimate control. And for many organizations, especially those

handling

sensitive PII, you know, personally identifiable information, or maybe those with

really solid

engineering teams, that control is absolutely worth the effort. Think about those

payroll

and HR companies mentioned in the source material. They explicitly chose DittoFeed

to hedge against

lock-in. Because for them, being trapped isn't just a cost risk, it's a security

risk too.

They much prefer owning their data, owning their infrastructure. It guarantees

price stability

and compliance basically forever. That makes a lot of sense, investing in control.

So structurally, who is this really built for? The sources seem to stress that

while it's

architected for massive scale, like millions of users, the UI is deliberately kept

simple enough

for non-technical team members to actually build and launch campaigns. So it sounds

like it's for

almost any organization needing to record messages. Exactly. And we see it being

used

really effectively in some pretty cutting edge places, specifically in DevTools

companies,

right? Their head of growth teams found DittoFeed, well, indispensable for their

product-led growth

tech stacks, their POG stacks. By automating really high quality onboarding

sequences,

they actually cited a direct improvement in time to value TTV for their new

customers.

And that's huge because it directly boosts conversion rates. It sort of bridges

that gap

between engineering power and marketing execution. Bridging the gap. Okay. That

leads us perfectly

into the low code toolkit. Section two, how this automation actually works under

the hood.

The idea seems to be once engineering hooks up the data initially, the marketing

and growth teams

can pretty much run with it, building complex sequences themselves. Yeah. And to

understand

how that automation works, especially if you're maybe newer to this, you really

just need to get

your head around three core components. Think of it like a, like a low code recipe

book that runs

itself once you set it up. So first you've got journeys. This is your main

automation canvas.

It's a visual drag and drop interface where you map out these multi-step, multi-trigger

sequences,

but it's not just a basic flow chart, you know, that's smarter than that.

It includes things like integrated branch-based analytics. So you can actually see

how tweaks

affect performance right there. And it respects local time zones, which sounds

small, but it

prevents those really embarrassing middle of the night messages going to users

across the globe,

a detail older systems often get wrong. Okay. Journeys make sense. Visual flows.

Next up is segments. This sounds like where the real targeting power comes in. For

a beginner,

maybe think of it like super advanced Excel filters, but running live against user

data.

That's a perfect analogy, actually. Segments are exactly that, the tool you use to

slice and dice

your user base. And it's based on what they do, their actions and who they are,

their properties.

So you can combine things like, say, viewed pricing page and event with identified

traits

like subscription status, trial expired. The real power comes from the unlimited

and or conditions.

It lets you get incredibly precise. You go way beyond just blasting an email to

everyone subscribed. Instead, you target like everyone who viewed feature X twice

this week,

but hasn't finished setting up their profile yet. Hyper targeted.

Got it. Journeys for the flow, segments for the who. And finally, the message

itself has to live

somewhere. That's templates, right? The content layer.

Exactly. Templates where you craft the actual message and inject that personalization

magic.

And users get flexibility here too. They can use a sort of notion-like low code

editor,

which is great for quick content. Or if they need more control, they can dive into

full HTML or

MJML for really polished designs. The key ingredient is the liquid syntax they use

for

personalization. That's pretty much the standard way to securely pull in user

details, name,

company, maybe their last login date, making sure every message feels relevant and

tailored.

Okay, before we jump into the more technical setup, let's talk reach. Because we're

not

just talking emails here anymore, are we? The sources emphasize this is truly omnichannel.

Oh, absolutely. The platform handles standard email and SMS directly, out of the

box. But

its real flexibility comes from webhooks. Webhooks act as this crucial integration

bridge. They let

you trigger a message or an action in almost any other system. We're talking mobile

push notifications

via another service, maybe messages in Slack, WhatsApp, even custom internal tools.

This means

one single automation journey can reach the user wherever is most effective,

whether that's a

welcome email or a critical password reset alert pinging their phone. That unified

approach seems

like a perfect lead-in to Section 3, which sounds like the real aha moment,

especially for product

developers. Embedded components. The source has mentioned significant savings in

engineering time

here. Huge savings. Yeah, think about building a customer engagement platform

inside your own

product from scratch. You know, complete with a decent template editor, a segmentation

engine,

a journey builder. It's a massive, massive project. Embedded components let

developers take any part

of the Ditto feed dashboard, the journey builder, the template editor, whatever,

and embed it

directly inside their own sauce application. And technically it's pretty

straightforward. They offer

either a simple iframe or an unstyled react component. So imagine if you sell, I

don't know,

a business analytics tool and your customers need to send messages based on the

insights from your

tool. Instead of building that messaging feature yourself, you can just embed Ditto

feeds components.

Instantly you offer your customers a full marketing automation suite. The source

material

mentioned building this internally could take a year or more, a whole year. For

listeners maybe not

deep in sauce development, why is replicating something like a good template editor

or segmentation

engine so time consuming? Right, it's not just the initial build effort which is

significant.

It's the ongoing maintenance, keeping up with features, dealing with all the edge

cases.

Building a resilient segmentation engine means handling potentially vast amounts of

real-time

data, complex query logic, performance tuning. Building a good visual editor means

wrestling

with UI UX, versioning, email client rendering quirks which are notoriously painful,

and keeping

APIs updated. So yeah, that year or more estimate sounds about right for getting

something robust.

Plus, like the source says, the ongoing maintenance headache. Embedded components

let you sidestep

that entire massive cost and effort. And clearly this isn't just aimed at small

startups needing

a quick fix. For larger enterprise users, Ditto Feed offers some pretty robust

control features.

It's noted as the only open source platform in this space offering programmatic

control over

multiple workspaces. That's right. And that control is absolutely essential for,

say, agencies managing

multiple clients or large companies with different brands or divisions. Programmatic

control means

you can manage these workspaces via API, ensuring complete data isolation between

each client or

brand. Plus, they offer white labeling and custom branding options. So when you

embed these components,

it looks and feels seamlessly like part of your application to the end customer.

Very professional. Okay, let's shift gears slightly and look under the hood. All

this front-end

flexibility and low-code stuff needs a solid foundation. And it sounds like this

platform

is really built with the developer, the engineer, who appreciates modern tech in

mind. Oh,

definitely. While the user experience aims for low-code simplicity, the core

infrastructure

is seriously cutting edge. It's a TypeScript application running on fast, scalable

tech.

You've got Postgres as the main database, ClickHouse, which is brilliant for

handling

high-volume event analytics really quickly, and Temporal for managing those complex,

long-running workflows reliably. This kind of architecture is vital if you're going

to handle

potentially millions of user events streaming in. And the developer focus extends

to how you

interact with it. Full REST API access for getting data in and out, plus an Admin

API,

specifically for managing workspaces, programmatically key for automating setups.

And they provide SDKs, too, for Web, Node.js, React Native,

just to make that integration work smoother for development teams.

I also noticed a focus on quality assurance and control, which sometimes gets

missed when

tools focus purely on speed. Things like branch-based Git workflows for managing

campaign changes? That sounds pretty sophisticated.

It is, and it's crucial for teams working collaboratively or needing proper version

control and rollback capabilities for their messaging campaigns, just like with

code.

And alongside that, there's a testing SDK. This is really cool. It lets developers

write

automated tests for their messaging campaigns that can run in their continuous

integration,

their CI pipeline. This means you catch errors programmatically before a broken

campaign

ever reaches a real user. It avoids that nightmare scenario of trying to manually

queue complex journeys in a live production environment. Saves time, protects users.

And obviously, tying right back to our initial points about control and security,

the ultimate developer feature. The ability to actually self-host the entire

platform,

protects sensitive PII inside your own walls. Exactly. It brings that control full

circle.

Control over the infrastructure, the data, the compliance, all the way through to

the

campaign logic and testing. Okay. Looking just briefly ahead now. The roadmap for

2025 shows

they're not standing still. What are some of the key things coming down the pipe?

Yeah. It looks

like they're moving towards more sophisticated ways of modeling users and

relationships.

For the first half of 2025, a big focus is on user grouping. This will let the

platform understand

and segment based on collections of users think like members of a specific team in

a B2B app

or users belonging to a particular club. That's really important for many business

use cases.

Then moving into Q2, they're planning identity resolution. This is super important

for stitching

together a user's journey across different devices or before and after they log in.

So connecting that anonymous browsing behavior with the identified user profile

once they sign up,

it gives you that complete unified view of the customer. And further out, any plans

mentioned

to make the low code side even faster or smarter? Yes, for Q3 2025, they're looking

at integrating

LLM's large language models. The idea seems to be using AI to help generate initial

drafts

of journeys, segments, maybe even message templates based on natural language

prompts.

So speeding up that campaign creation process even more for marketing teams,

letting them prototype faster. So if we kind of pull this all together, what does

it all mean?

I think the big takeaway is that Ditto Feed offers this knowledge hedge, perhaps.

It gives you huge

flexibility in that crucial self-hosting control to guard against rising costs and

vendor lock-in.

But it does this while also providing genuinely powerful low-code tools like

journeys and segments

that let teams move really fast. It's about maximizing power while minimizing that

proprietary

risk. Right. Considering that combination guaranteed price stability from the self-hosting

option, plus potentially saving, you know, a year of engineering time by using

embedded components.

Here's a final thought, a provocative question for you, the listener.

How would redirecting those resources, the budget saved on volume pricing,

the engineering time saved by embedding instead of building? How could that let you

genuinely

accelerate your core product development next year? What could you build if you

weren't maintaining

messaging infrastructure? That's definitely something powerful to think about reallocating

that focus. Thank you so much for joining us for this deep dive into DittoFeed and

one final thank

you to our supporter, SafeServer. They assist with software hosting and digital

You can find out more at www.safeserver.de

You can find out more at www.safeserver.de