Should you build your own PostHog?
Product analytics with session replay, feature flags, and a data warehouse
First-party collection and a dashboard that answers your top five questions is one sitting of work, and PostHog's free tier covers a million events a month before you pay anything. What the bill buys past that is the rest of the platform: session replay, feature flags, SQL over years of events, and ingestion that stays correct while your event schema drifts underneath it.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build me a self-hosted web analytics box to replace PostHog. Requirements:
- One Node 22 + Express process with better-sqlite3, serving the collector and the
dashboard on port 8787. No frontend framework, no build step, no Docker.
- A tracker.js I paste on my sites: pageviews on load and history change, plus
window.track('signup', { plan: 'pro' }), POSTed to /e on my own domain so
collection stays first-party.
- One SQLite events table: site, event, path, referrer, UTM fields, country from the
proxy header, device class, and a JSON properties blob.
- Count visitors by a daily-rotating salted hash of IP plus user agent, salt in .env.
No cookie, never the raw IP. That is the whole privacy design, keep it.
- Dashboard at / with a date range picker: visitors and pageviews by day, top pages,
referrers, countries, any event split by one property, and a three-step funnel.
- Nightly rollup into a daily-summary table, raw events pruned past the retention
window in .env, /export.csv for the raw rows.
- Basic auth on the dashboard, collector open. No accounts, no telemetry, my box
holds the only copy.
- Out of scope: session replay, feature flags, and stitching one person across
devices. Do not build a plugin system or a warehouse connector.
- README: the snippet to paste, where the SQLite file lives, and how to back it up.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running.
What would building your own look like?
Collect first-party pageviews and custom events from your own sites, keep the raw rows yourself, and answer a handful of product questions from a local dashboard.
What you will need
- Node 22
- a small always-on VPS
- a domain you control, for first-party collection
Teams pay because analytics has to keep collecting and stay trustworthy while the product changes underneath it. The bill buys bot filtering, identity resolution, late-arriving data, retention, query cost, and someone else getting paged when ingestion stops. The charts are the cheap part.
xsession replay
xfeature flags and experiments
xidentity stitching across devices
xSQL over years of events
xingestion that stays up without you watching it
How much does PostHog cost?
No public price. Check the official site.
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on PostHog’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | What is included |
|---|---|---|---|
| free | $0/workspace | $0/workspace | 1 project, 1-year retention, unlimited team members; monthly product allowances include 1M analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100,000 exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1M warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline trigger events plus 1M batch rows, 100,000 AI-observability events, 500 AI credits, 3 PRs, 10,000 workflow messages/channel, 10GB logs, and 2,500 Replay Vision credits |
| pay-as-you-go | $0/workspace | - | Starts at $0 while under the same monthly free allowances; 6 projects, 7-year retention, unlimited team members and tracked users |
| boost platform package | $250/workspace≈ $250 | - | Adds platform-level controls and support features to the separately metered PostHog products |
| scale platform package | $750/workspace≈ $750 | - | Higher platform-level controls and support package; product usage remains separately metered |
| enterprise platform package | custom | - | Custom platform controls, support and commercial terms; all product usage remains separately priced |
Free tier1 project and 1-year retention; monthly: 1M analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100,000 exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1M warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline trigger events plus 1M batch rows, 100,000 AI-observability events, 500 AI credits, 3 PRs, 10,000 workflow messages/channel, 10GB logs, and 2,500 Replay Vision credits; unlimited team members
Billing termsmonthly usage-based billing only; no annual plan published; free allowances reset monthly and remain after adding a card
Additional costsEvery product meters separately after its free allowance: analytics from $0.00005/anonymous event or $0.000248/identified event, replay from $0.005/recording, flags from $0.0001/request, surveys from $0.10/response, warehouse rows from $0.000015, pipelines from $0.0005/trigger event, exceptions from $0.00037, AI from $0.01/credit, logs from $0.25/GB, workflows from $0.003/email, Inbox at $15/PR, and Replay Vision at $0.01/credit; optional Boost/Scale packages add $250/$750 per month.
verified 2026-10-20 · source ↗
Is it cheaper to build or buy PostHog?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (closest consolation build: one sitting). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild PostHog?
Not really. PostHog’s value is not the code: A pipeline that never quietly stops collecting is the product, and that is the part you inherit when you self-host. See the honest breakdown above.
How much does PostHog cost?
PostHog’s pricing is usage-based or varies by plan · No fixed monthly plan; free monthly allowance then per-unit rates (e.g. anonymous events $0.00005 each after the first 1M)..
What do I lose by replacing PostHog?
Honestly: session replay; feature flags and experiments; identity stitching across devices; SQL over years of events; ingestion that stays up without you watching it. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to PostHog?
Yes: Umami (Popular open-source privacy-focused web analytics platform.). Using prior art is also vibecoding; the prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.