Analytics and monitoring decision
MACRODATA
A competent engineer can build a basic 3D session-replay prototype (multi-week effort) using existing open-source analytics projects for backend/instrumentation, but reproducing a polished, scalable commercial product with integrations, long-term storage, and UX polish is substantial work so keeping the paid product may be reasonable.
Visit website↗Built by Marc Lou, who ships 32 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off120 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
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. All MACRODATA alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Instrument pages to capture page events and sessions, store events, stream sessions to a dashboard, and render a 3D realtime session-replay view for inspection.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, production-hardened UI/UX and cross-browser testing
- Scalable ingestion, long-term analytics storage, and compression/retention policies
- Built-in integrations with advertising/marketing platforms and single-click installs
- Commercial SLAs, support, and ongoing feature development
- Any proprietary 3D assets, UX polish, and product analytics optimizations
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
MACRODATA 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 analytics + 3D session-replay prototype using Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres for storage, Socket.IO for realtime, a small React dashboard, and Three.js for 3D rendering. Core features in scope: (1) a lightweight JS snippet that captures page events (click, scroll, URL, timestamps) and posts to an ingest API; (2) ingest API that validates and stores events into Postgres and groups by session id; (3) a dashboard to list/search sessions and open a session player; (4) a session player that streams events over websocket and replays them as moving avatars in a simple Three.js office scene with camera controls; (5) basic user auth and simple admin UI. Out of scope: analytics funnels, advanced aggregation pipelines, multi-tenant billing, mobile SDKs, and long-term storage policies. Include error handling, input validation, tests for ingest and session assembly, Dockerfiles for local dev, and README with deployment steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 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 · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productMacrodata — watch your website visitors in a live 3D office
- open sourcehyperdxio/hyperdx
- open sourceopenobserve/openobserve
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
