Analytics and monitoring decision
PostHog
A small engineering team can build a useful, limited analytics replacement (event ingestion, storage, aggregates, dashboards); PostHog's integrations and brand scale are valuable but not impossible for a competent team to match for narrow use cases, and pricing/support advantages remain reasons some teams will prefer the hosted product.
Visit website↗$250/mo
$3,000/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$35/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
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 PostHog alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect client events, store them, run aggregations/queries, and display simple dashboards/insights.
What it still won’t have
- Session replay recordings and replay UX
- Managed warehouse features and 120+ source/destination connectors
- Usage-based billing, SLA'd support, and enterprise features (RBAC, dedicated proxies)
- AI features (PostHog AI, AI Observability, Replay Vision) and built-in agent automation
- Scale and operational reliability without SRE investment
What remains hard
- Integration maintenance
Data from 120+ external sources like Stripe, Postgres, and HubSpot
- Brand trust
Join 500,000+ teams already shipping with PostHog.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
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 stack using Node.js (Express) for ingestion, ClickHouse (or Postgres) for event storage, Redis for short-term dedupe, a background worker in Python/Node to pre-aggregate time-series/funnels, and a React dashboard. In scope: event ingestion API with validation, storage schema and retention, hourly aggregation jobs, basic auth and single-project UI, dashboards for event counts, funnels, and simple cohort queries, and a small metrics endpoint for usage. Out of scope: session replay recording/player, AI features, managed warehouse connectors, multi-tenant billing, and enterprise RBAC. Include error handling, request validation, retries for failed writes, retention cleanup jobs, and unit tests for ingestion and aggregation logic. Provide deployment scripts for a single VPS (Docker Compose) and a one-page README with run and backup instructions.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score89
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 productPostHog – We make your product self-driving
- official pricingPostHog pricing – Transparent, usage-based, generous free tier
- official docsPostHog documentation
- open sourcePostHog/posthog
- open sourceopenreplay/openreplay
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
