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?
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
i.e., if you want user analytics to be auto-deleted after 90 days, there’s literally no way to do that yet.
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.
