PostHog
Open source product analytics, session recording, and A/B testing
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Aug 2026
PostHog bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking and LLM observability into one platform. The free cloud tier is real: 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M flag requests, 1,500 survey responses and 100K error exceptions a month.
Self-hosting is effectively over. PostHog's own docs call self-hosted deployments officially unsupported, new Kubernetes deployments are no longer supported, and the hobby Docker Compose path is recommended only under 300K events a month. Their free cloud tier is 1M. They are telling you the free hosted plan handles more than the copy you run yourself.
Cloud is the product now. Events past the free million start at $0.00005 each and drop steeply with volume. Recordings past 5K run $0.005. Free gives one project and a year of retention, and adding a card gets six projects and seven years. SSO and advanced RBAC sit behind platform add-ons starting around $250 a month. Solo and small teams live in the free tier a long time. Medium teams pay usage and still beat Mixpanel or Amplitude.
The catch used to be that doing everything means nothing is best-in-class. Still true. The bigger one now is that the open source escape hatch is decorative. If self-hosting is the actual requirement, look at Plausible (plausible/analytics), Umami (umami-software/umami) or Matomo (matomo-org/matomo), and Unleash (Unleash/unleash) for flags.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
freemiumFree Cloud Tier
- 1M product analytics events per month
- 5K session recordings, or 2.5K mobile recordings
- 1M feature flag requests
- 1,500 survey responses
- 100K error tracking exceptions
- 1M data warehouse rows
- 100K AI observability events
- 10 GB of logs
- 1 project, 1 year data retention, unlimited team members, community support
Cloud Pricing
- Adding a card moves you to pay as you go: 6 projects, 7 year retention, email support, per-product billing limits
- Analytics events past 1M: from $0.00005 each, dropping steeply at higher volume
- Session recordings past 5K: $0.005 each, $0.01 for mobile, cheaper at high volume
- Feature flag requests past 1M: $0.0001 each
- Survey responses past 1,500: $0.10 each
- Error exceptions past 100K: $0.00037 each
- Data warehouse rows past 1M: $0.000015 each
- Platform add-ons gate SSO, advanced RBAC, SLAs and higher-touch support, starting around $250 per month
Self-Hosted Costs
- Officially unsupported. PostHog's docs state they offer no guarantees around it working
- New Kubernetes deployments are no longer supported
- The hobby Docker Compose deployment is MIT licensed but has no tagged releases and deploys continuously from main
- Recommended only under 300K events, 1K recordings and 300K flag calls per month, all below the free cloud allowances
- Infrastructure: ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis and Kafka, 8GB RAM minimum, realistically $50 to $200 per month in compute
- Ops burden: heavy, and now without vendor support
When to Pay
Use cloud almost always. The free tier covers a startup well past launch, and usage pricing beats Mixpanel and Amplitude at the same volume. Pay for a platform add-on only when SSO or RBAC is a procurement requirement. Self-host only for a hobby project or a hard data residency mandate, and go in knowing you are on your own.
The free cloud tier covers most startups well past launch and event pricing dropped sharply. Self-hosting is now officially unsupported, so treat cloud as the only real path.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; the cloud free tier is generous and there is zero ops
- Small team
- free up to 1M events a month, then usage pricing that stays cheap
- Medium team
- cloud usage pricing, still cheaper than Mixpanel or Amplitude at the same volume
- Large team
- cloud plus a platform add-on from about $250 a month for SSO and RBAC. Self-hosting is no longer a supported path
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