Analytics and monitoring decision
Amplitude
A competent engineer can build a useful, small-scale product-analytics replacement (events ingestion, funnels, cohorts, dashboard) in about a week, but reproducing Amplitude's scale, session-replay, AI agents, integrations, and enterprise controls is not realistic without significant engineering and ongoing ops.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Collect client events, store events, run funnel/cohort queries, render simple dashboards, and export cohort lists for targeting.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise-scale event indexing, storage, and retention management
- Built-in AI Agents, MCP integrations, and AI Feedback workflows
- Session replay at scale and advanced replay capture features
- Advanced feature-management controls (RBAC, portfolio-level projects, percent-based pricing tiers)
- Hundreds of vendor integrations and managed support/onboarding
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Amplitude does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted product-analytics service using Node.js (Express) + Postgres (or ClickHouse) + React. In scope: 1) lightweight browser SDK (or example snippet) that POSTs events to the server; 2) ingestion API that validates events and writes to a partitioned events table; 3) SQL-based funnel and cohort computation endpoints; 4) React dashboard to define a funnel, run queries, and show time-series and funnel-step breakdowns; 5) cohort export (CSV) and a webhook endpoint. Out of scope: session replay recording, advanced experiment management, RBAC, enterprise-scale retention, and AI agents. Include input validation, retries for ingestion, basic auth for the dashboard API, automated tests for ingestion and query endpoints, and Docker compose files to run locally.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAmplitude product homepage
- official pricingAmplitude pricing page
- official productAmplitude Feature Management
- open sourcePostHog/posthog
- open sourcegrowthbook/growthbook
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
