[HN Gopher] Posthog - open-source analytics and UX research tool
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Posthog - open-source analytics and UX research tool
Author : gerroo
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-06-03 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Why is the self hosted version framed as a "hobby"?
|
| Is this another one of those enshittification of open source
| where open source is used more as a marketing gimmick instead of
| following it's true ethos?
| encodedrose wrote:
| Fairly accurate, you can only get support if you're using their
| cloud product.
|
| "We no longer support paid, open-source deployments and it is
| no longer possible to buy licenses for self-hosted versions -
| we instead recommend migrating to PostHog Cloud." - from:
| https://posthog.com/docs/self-host
| ezekg wrote:
| Why are they obligated to provide support for a free open
| source project?
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| it's not a free open project if only part of it is open and
| the development is done by a central company that sells the
| other half.
| airstrike wrote:
| not everybody agrees with that take
| pc86 wrote:
| Open source maintainers are not obligated to provide
| support. They're certainly not obligated to do so for
| free.
| encodedrose wrote:
| OP's ask was: "Is this another one ... where open source is
| used more as a marketing gimmick"
|
| My original comment wasn't intended to indicate that there
| is an obligation to provide support. The deliberate choice
| to: a) not offer paid support for open-source deployments,
| and b) sunsetting the Kubernetes deployments in favor of
| their cloud version, is a signal that shows PostHog doesn't
| /really/ want you to be running the software in a self-
| hosted manner.
|
| Just look at the "Open-source hobby deploy" (from the
| README in git) which calls out that it "should scale to
| approximately 100k events per month" but their cloud
| offering gives you 1 million events per month for free.
| What is the point of the hobby "deploy"?
|
| Back to OP -- my answer is yes, this is a source-available
| service that you can modify and play around with locally.
| The source and documentation behind the operations of
| PostHog aren't available.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that oss is used as marketing
| bait.
|
| a) offering paid support for bespoke selfhosted
| installations is an entirely different business model
| than building a managed service on your oss offering
|
| b) maintaining k8s/helm charts is work - who is paying
| for that? The selfhosting users certainly aren't and
| usually contributions are not enough and even then still
| need reviews.
|
| You think it's a deliberate choice. Yes it's the choice
| between going out of business and continuing.
| mariusandra wrote:
| The math didn't add up for us (I work at PostHog). At the
| rate we were scaling, we would have needed an entire call
| center's worth of highly trained Kubernetes support
| engineers to debug everyone's "my pods just died" /
| "Kafka just stopped" / "what is Zookeeper" problems.
|
| This stack isn't straightforward to manage, and we
| couldn't crack the code of doing it at scale for other
| people without even having access to their systems. There
| was no malicious intent.
|
| Read more here: https://posthog.com/blog/sunsetting-helm-
| support-posthog
| danr4 wrote:
| That's a pet peeve of mine so I'll chime in.
|
| I've actually used it self hosted pretty much since posthog
| launched and moved to their cloud after a couple years. Our
| product blew up and it was difficult to scale, as well as a few
| hosted only features that we needed (by then we raised and
| could afford it).
|
| I also contributed code (and got some swag) which was promptly
| merged.
|
| They've also open sourced how they run the company and
| onboarding (similar to GitLab).
|
| All in all I think posthog is one of the most balanced open
| source product in the market, in terms of the easiness of self
| hosting, the feature set, the engineering culture, openness and
| business model.
|
| If you don't have a lot of traffic self hosted is excellent and
| can take you very far.
| mrj wrote:
| I tried to self-host recently and there was a lot of
| brokenness, and they discontinued the helm chart. They
| clearly don't want you to actually self host anymore and it's
| a shame. I have security requirements and can't yet afford
| their security-approved cloud product.
| danr4 wrote:
| yeah it's been a while since I ran it, might have changed
| course (wouldn't surprise me)
| timgl wrote:
| What was broken? Part of discontinuing the helm chart was
| putting more effort into supporting the docker compose
| deployment so we'd love to fix this!
| portaouflop wrote:
| Maintaining a helm chart is a non-zero amount of work - why
| do you think this should be provided for you?
| james_impliu wrote:
| (Founder) wanted to explain our intent behind the business...
| so here's the origin story.
|
| We tried to make the business work exclusively with self hosted
| and open source focus. I thought cloud would never work as we
| have so much competition. However we just couldn't make hosting
| it at scale a good experience. We often have more data than
| customers production instances.
|
| We wound up having to spend a ton of time debugging k8s in
| other people's infra via screenshots. This wasn't good for us
| or customers.
|
| We kept having people hosting it themselves for no reason other
| than liking us so for the sake of a good experience for them,
| we made a cloud product. This represented the majority of
| users. It's also cheaper for most people as we just have a big
| free tier and shared infra costs, so no hosting bill. Turns out
| cloud worked.
|
| We didn't want to abandon the OS project but we stopped trying
| to make money via an open core model. That means we call it a
| hobby instance because it just doesn't scale very well.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > That means we call it a hobby instance because it just
| doesn't scale very well.
|
| Well you guys almost certainly operate posthog in Kubernetes
| yourselves. You either use a cloud-provided database, or you
| use a Kubernetes operator to run it on top of someone's
| infrastructure. Clickhouse, Kafka, whatever. They all have
| operators. I don't know when you adopted Temporal. Whatever.
| I may not be 100% right, but this is true in general.
|
| The hobby offering doesn't _have_ to scale poorly. It could
| scale just as well as your core offering. I am not saying you
| should, you are entitled to monetize something. It also doesn
| 't _have_ to be hard to install. You could author a Posthog
| CRD instead of using Helm as a low budget CRD. Maybe you
| already have that. Maybe your CRD exists as rows in some
| database and not in Kubernetes 's dataplane. The interesting
| part of all of this is that you had an intuition that
| Kubernetes obsoletes a lot of the value proposition of
| traditional SaaS. The problem is figuring out, well, what IS
| the value proposition? People will endure a _lot_ of brain
| damage to save on recurring costs, it is _totally_ rational.
|
| Another POV is this shows the limitations of Y Combinator's
| offering. It's true that enterprise sales goes way faster
| when it's startup CEO to startup CEO. Until you guys are
| worth billions of dollars, and even then, it's not 100%, your
| counterpart at a Fortune 1000 might be some CTO, some
| managing director with no real decisionmaking power. But he
| asks his team to pay the contractors in Pakistan to take the
| brain damage of self hosting Posthog and reimplementing your
| premium features, all because he cannot get meaningful
| approval for unlimited, use-based pricing, and then if you
| acquiesce to fixed pricing, you leave so much money on the
| table, and you sign up to dedicate a whole engineer to
| _their_ customization and problems. While Kubernetes isn 't
| to blame for this, it did make the Pakistan BANTA possible,
| and probably brought down pricing by a lot, hurting everyone
| trying to make good software for money. Very, very tough
| situation.
|
| Something I can't really figure out is why Posthog hasn't
| gotten on Bitnami's (VMWare's) radar. Piwik and Matomo are.
| Mirantis has a great Kubernetes distribution, maybe the most
| painless one for people who are willing to take brain damage,
| and they could wind up doing this too. As always OSS is a
| value for someone else's thing that that someone else didn't
| pay for.
| nurple wrote:
| My experience with it was a PM creating a ticket for our ops
| group with the title "install posthog" targeting our onprem k8s
| infra. He had included a link to the helm chart, but that's
| about it.
|
| When I cracked open the chart I just started laughing. It
| installs not just clickhouse (via the operator), but also kafka
| and zookeeper!
|
| This is _not_ a product I would ever self host unless you're
| planning to provide a handful of FTEs to install, manage, and
| fix some of the most complicated software you can run on
| Kubernetes.
| eevo wrote:
| We've integrated posthog (cloud hosted) and have been using it
| for a few months now. It's got a rough edge or two but it's
| tight, integrated nicely with the codebase, and an order of
| magnitude cheaper than amplitude. I'd like a nicer sentry
| integration
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| i was very sad to see posthog enabled by default with a hardcoded
| key in open-interpreter, with a tiny disclaimer that telemetry
| had been added just with a new feature flag quietly introduced to
| disable it. Sad to see this sort of thing getting shipped by
| default, surprised to see my local llm calls leaving my PC. I
| don't know why developers consider logging a challenge for some
| reason and default to using MSP for everything including internal
| logs. Seems unwise in this age of valuable data to just give it
| away for free when you can just write to a data layer you own...
| alphabetatheta wrote:
| Posthog has been a fantastically useful tool to understand how
| our product is being used! Don't get some of the hate - any OSS
| company will probably embed some telemetry occassionally.
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| Using Posthog (hosted, free tier) for a side project. It was easy
| to set up and is pleasant to use! Better than another product in
| this area I had previously tried.
| mattvr wrote:
| Love posthog in many ways, but confused and a non-starter that
| they don't support any data deletion yet.
|
| i.e., if you want user analytics to be auto-deleted after 90
| days, there's literally no way to do that yet.
| jwithington wrote:
| Lol what?? What's their retention policy?
| timgl wrote:
| Hi, PostHog co-founder here. We support deletion of individual
| users and entire projects, so it's inaccurate to say we "don't
| support any data deletion". We also TTL recordings after 1
| month for free users and 3 months for paid users. You're right
| that we don't have a way of TTL-ing out events data
| automatically.
|
| We have had some requests [0]for this though it hasn't been
| requested that often hence we haven't prioritised this. We've
| recently improved some of our tooling around this so should be
| easier for us to ship.
|
| [0] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/17031
| simple10 wrote:
| Big fan of posthog. I've been using it for over a year and loving
| it as a replacement or augmentation to Google Analytics for
| funnels and user interactions.
| brvsft wrote:
| I don't understand the name Posthog. Seems like it is prompting
| users to upload photos of their penis.
| devmor wrote:
| I noticed that their twitter ads had comments disabled. This is
| probably why.
| fragmede wrote:
| it grabs (hogs all of) the output from http POST.
| brimstedt wrote:
| Anyone know how it compares to mouseflow?
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