Analytics and monitoring decision
Pelagic Analytics
A competent engineer can recreate the core analytics and a basic LLM-driven SEO agent by combining existing open-source analytics (eg. Umami/PostHog) and an LLM integration, but the full product experience—daily autonomous article automation, polished integrations, reliability, and UX polish—would be costly to match.
Visit website↗Built by Tony Conte, who ships 4 products in this index
$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off128 h to build
$400/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 82 seats.
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 Pelagic Analytics alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect pageviews and events with a small script, show real-time dashboards and revenue attribution, and run an LLM-based agent that suggests/writes articles and publishes via webhook; measure article performance and iterate.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, production UI and UX polish
- Mature, built-in revenue attribution connectors and edge-case handling
- Daily, autonomous AI agent tuning and production reliability
- Support, monitoring, uptime guarantees and brand trust
- Public shared dashboards and turnkey onboarding flows
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 82 seats.
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 Pelagic replacement using Node.js (Express) + Postgres (or ClickHouse for events) + a simple React dashboard. Scope: (1) a <1KB client JS tracking script that POSTs pageviews/events to the server; (2) an ingestion pipeline that writes events to ClickHouse or Postgres and performs basic sessionization and event counting; (3) Stripe webhook integration to record revenue and attribute it to traffic sources; (4) a React dashboard with live visitor list, simple charts (per-pageviews, sources, revenue), and a public read-only page per site; (5) an LLM-driven SEO agent service that queries the analytics DB, generates article drafts via OpenAI-compatible API, and publishes via a configurable webhook/WordPress API (include an 'In Review' mode and 'Autopublish' mode). Out of scope: enterprise multi-tenant scaling, advanced UI polish, and a global SSE/Push network. Provide error handling, retries for webhooks, authentication for workspace/site API keys, tests for ingestion and the publish flow, and setup scripts (Docker Compose) and deployment instructions for a single VPS.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
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 productPelagic product and pricing
- open sourceumami-software/umami
- open sourceplausible/analytics
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
