Your Event Tracking Bill Just Spiked.
Your CFO Capped Martech Spend.
Your Board Wants Attribution in 14 Days.
How post-Series A SaaS teams are escaping enterprise CDP pricing and getting warehouse-first event tracking—without hiring a data engineer.
You hired the contractor. Found them on Upwork, vetted their event tracking experience, paid the premium rate. They spent six weeks wiring up your event tracking, connected it to your warehouse, and left you with a Notion doc titled “Event Schema v2.”
Three months later, you’re staring at 500 events firing to nowhere, a CDP bill that just crossed $2,000 a month, and a contractor who doesn’t answer emails anymore. The documentation they left? It describes an architecture that no longer matches what’s actually running.
You begged your CTO for data engineering time. They gave you two hours per sprint. It’s not enough to diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. And now the CFO is on Slack at 7am, forwarding the overage invoice, asking why martech costs are up 40% quarter over quarter.
The board meeting is in two weeks. They want LTV:CAC by channel. You have 30 hours of manual SQL ahead of you, and you already know the numbers will be wrong.
This Isn’t a Tooling Problem. It’s a Data Architecture Problem.
Every SaaS startup makes the same three decisions in their first year that create this exact crisis at $3M ARR.
You chose client-side tracking because you needed speed
Google Analytics plus ad pixels. Fast to set up, enough to prove early traction. But now ad blockers and iOS privacy updates are silently eating 25–30% of your events, and you have no server-side backup.
You never invested in marketing infrastructure
The founder was focused on product-market fit. Analytics was a spreadsheet. By the time you realized you needed a real data stack, you were already running $40k/month in ad spend on incomplete data.
You hired marketers who run campaigns, not pipelines
Your team of 3–5 is excellent at creative, bidding strategy, and copy. Nobody knows how to build event pipelines or manage a ClickHouse cluster. That wasn’t in the job description.
The result is predictable: every dollar of your $30k+ monthly ad spend is trapped in silos. Facebook has one view. Google has another. HubSpot has a third. Your warehouse—if you even have one—has fragments of all three, none of them matching.
What This Gap Is Actually Costing You Every Month
And it gets worse on a timeline.
You’ve Tried the Obvious Solutions. Here’s Why They Failed.
“We hired a contractor to set up our event tracking”
They left you with 500 events firing to nowhere and no documentation. The architecture no longer matches what’s running, and they’re not returning emails. You paid for setup, not for ownership.
“We begged the CTO for engineering time”
You got two hours per sprint. That’s not enough to diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Your CTO is focused on product features—marketing infrastructure will never win a sprint planning vote.
“We looked at Rudderstack”
Their documentation assumes you have a team of data engineers. You have a marketing coordinator and yourself. The gap between their docs and your team’s capabilities is a chasm.
“We explored Fivetran”
It can’t handle the custom event properties from your product-led growth flow. Your most valuable behavioral signals—the ones that separate high-LTV users from churners—can’t be captured.
“We considered just paying for enterprise CDP pricing”
$30k/year with a 3-year lock-in. During a cash-conscious post-Series A period where you just laid off 10% of staff. Your CFO won’t sign it. And even if they did, you’d be building deeper into a platform where your own user behavior data isn’t portable.
Every standard solution assumes you have something you don’t: either the engineering resources to self-implement, or the budget to pay enterprise prices. You need something designed for the gap between those two options.
Warehouse-First Event Tracking at a Fraction of Enterprise CDP Pricing—Without Becoming a Data Engineer
The problem isn’t just what you’re paying for event tracking. It’s that you don’t own your data pipeline, and that’s limiting your growth.
Jitsu is an open-source event-streaming platform that gives you server-side tracking, real-time warehouse sync, and full data ownership—server-side tracking, real-time warehouse sync, full data ownership—at a fraction of the cost. But open source doesn’t mean you’re on your own.
Lux Marketing’s Jitsu consulting exists for exactly this moment: the one where you know warehouse-first is the right architecture but can’t hire a data engineer to build it.
Audit & Migration Plan
We map your current event tracking implementation, identify broken events, and design a Jitsu architecture tailored to your specific tracking needs and warehouse setup.
Jitsu Implementation
We deploy Jitsu with server-side tracking, migrate your event schemas, connect your warehouse, and set up real-time syncs to your ad platforms—with zero downtime on existing tracking.
Attribution & Ongoing Support
We build the channel-level LTV:CAC reporting your board needs, train your team, and provide ongoing optimization support so you never need a data engineer on staff.
The result: board-ready attribution in 30 days, CDP costs cut by 90%, and your growth marketer gets 15 hours a week back to do actual marketing.
You Don’t Need a Data Engineer. You Need the Right Partner.
This Is Built for a Very Specific Situation
30-minute call. We’ll map your current stack and tell you exactly what migration looks like for your setup.
The Cost You Haven’t Calculated Yet
There’s a number that doesn’t show up in your CDP invoice or your Google Ads dashboard.
Your “data-driven culture” is a myth. Right now, million-dollar ad decisions at your company are based on whoever built the last spreadsheet. Your marketing manager has one version. Your CEO has another. Neither is complete, and both are wrong in different ways.
Meanwhile, ad blockers and iOS privacy restrictions are silently eating 25–30% of your client-side events. Every audience you build, every attribution model you run, every budget decision you make—all based on a dataset that’s missing a quarter of the picture. And you have no server-side backup capturing what’s being lost.
You’re not just overpaying for event tracking. You’re building deeper into a platform where your own user behavior data isn’t portable. Every month you stay, the switching cost grows. Every custom integration you build makes you more dependent on a vendor who knows it.
The startups that break through the $5M ARR ceiling aren’t the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They’re the ones who can actually see where their money is working.
You didn’t need unified attribution to get to $3M ARR. You need it to get to $10M.
Stop renting your data pipeline.
Start owning it.
Board-ready attribution in 30 days. No data engineer required. 90% cost reduction from day one.
Book Your Free Migration Assessment