PostHog Pricing Teardown
PostHog is an open source product analytics platform. Their usage-based pricing with multiple add-ons seems complicated. Read this article to figure out whether you need to pay.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.
What is PostHog
PostHog is an open source product analytics tool. It's similar to Amplitude or Mixpanel and is quickly expanding into more product categories – e.g. recently they've launched surveys. At some point they called themselves "The open source product OS".
Their pricing principles
14100 stars on Github
Pricing structure
All product parts are structured the same – MIT-licensed self-hosting + cloud plan with free event limit and volume discounts.
Self-hosted and free cloud versions are the same and come castrated with reduced functionality unless you pay. There's also Enterprise version with more compliance and dedicated support – at custom price, of course.
Each product part is priced separately and is pure usage-based:
Basic product analytics – cloud is free until 1M monthly events, $0.00031/event after. Free version lacks:
no dashboard updates – great for stakeholders who want to get weekly emails
permissions help set up access control
tags make finding the right insights and dashboards faster
lifecycle cohorts which group users based on their long-term behaviour patterns
group analytics – an add-on that allows you to "merge" users into groups/super-users; seems super helpful for analyzing product adoption within orgs if you're into PLG – even at 25% rate hike
Session replays – cloud is free until 15K monthly recordings, then $0.005/recording. Free versions do not track user network performance, has limited number of playlists and has no recording export
Feature flags & A/B testing – cloud is free until 1M monthly requests, then $0.0001/request. Free version has feature flags but lacks every experimentation feature
Surveys (freshly out of beta) – cloud is free until 250 monthly responses, then $0.2/response. Free version does not have multiple questions, which makes it (imo) barely useful even with user property targeting
Free/self-hosted version also lacks support outside community, white labeling and project access permissions
Does it make sense to pay?
It depends. I probably would. But I’m already a fan of the product and have been writing about it — see how to set PostHog up on Webflow sites.
Basic product analytics, session replays and feature flags cant take you *very* far, especially if you're self-hosting and is not limited by storage. MIT license makes sure you can integrate it into your products safely.
At the same time, their pricing team really knows what their users want. I am a former PM who self-hosts it for my current projects, but I salivate when I see:
built-in A/B testing that supports trend experiments and tracking health metrics
org analytics (June.so has built a whole product and got into YC out of that)
surveys with easy targeting
Having said that, it will get very pricey very quickly. The scarier thing is that if they really help you make better decisions, your business will only grow — and so will their bills.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.