I recently had to turn off posthog on my app, it was collecting so much information that wasn't needed that it was making my app unusably slow. I'm sure i'm missing some knob, but the fact that after an hour long claude code session i couldn't figure out how to fix it means posthog has gotten too fiddly.
madjam002 1 hours ago [-]
Last time I checked, Posthog self hosted was basically unusable. They have a hobby deployment script which just pulls the latest build from master which varies from “somewhat works” to “completely broken”
> We also learned that the tools to do that automation just don't exist. We kept finding new failure modes. When onboarding a new customer we would have to vet their engineering team for Kubernetes experience so that we'd be confident they could help us debug issues in their PostHog deploy. Folks that didn't have infra experience would often be able to get something set up, only to get stuck when something went wrong.
I empathize that this is a sane choice for PostHog to make as a business. But - if you can't deploy and dogfood your changes, are you truly able to maintain a fork with customizations? And if you can't use your own changes, is the software open-source, or source-available?
Perhaps the punchline is that any scalable & performant web analytics platform must necessarily be a distributed system of ingestion and storage services, and that complexity is like oil and water with the classic "you should be able to swap out the dependencies on your systems with ones you fork" open-source ethos.
PostHog had an opportunity to break this trend, to innovate and invest in those automations they correctly said didn't exist - and I was cheering them on. I've been saddened to see them move in the opposite direction.
geekuillaume 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I tried self-hosting it a couple of month ago and it was impossible. I spent the day on it but the setup process was broken because of a recent change which was made for their cloud offering. Managing both a codebase both adapted to a cloud deployment with a huge amount of users and to a self-hosted way small deployment is very hard and requires a lot of resources. It's hard to justify investing this much time and money in making it work well for a self-hosted setup, and it seems like they stopped doing so.
It's still great to make the code open, but it's not usable anymore for a self-hosted setup.
zacksiri 14 minutes ago [-]
They want you to buy their hosted service, that's where the convenience is sold. If they give you a one liner script you can paste in or a docker compose that does everything from scratch they cannot sell their hosted services.
osigurdson 12 minutes ago [-]
It seems like an odd thing to run locally with so many dependencies.
cyanydeez 1 hours ago [-]
we went from batteries not included to BYOAi
sskates 38 minutes ago [-]
Would love for you to try Amplitude. We've put a lot of work into making sure the core is usable. We've also started to fix a lot of the most common complaints about our pricing.
lta 23 minutes ago [-]
How is this relevant ? We're talking about open source analytics, and this looks like a shameless plus
gagan2020 46 minutes ago [-]
Looks like they created mess with AI and then open sourced it. I remembered I had to shift from them to metabase because they closed sourced their deployments docker/kubernetes I guess it was 3 years back.
But now AI screwed them over so they come with their own open-source spaghetti.
robbie-c 43 minutes ago [-]
PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.
ameliaquining 3 minutes ago [-]
PostHog has always been open core and source-available. What's new is that they now publish a GitHub repo containing just the open source parts.
opem 18 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, I was thinking this too!
mooreds 25 minutes ago [-]
I thought the same thing. What changed, if anything?
heyheyhouhou 36 minutes ago [-]
I used to like their product but now they too many modules and knobs that I find it difficult to understand and navigate.
I think is a bit of product slopification.
paularmstrong 32 minutes ago [-]
They've been using AI to shove a lot of AI into their product and trying to force everyone to use AI. I really don't understand the why of any of it. The product was working great for what it needs to do. I don't need AI to make guesses about data for me and I especially do not want _yet another product_ trying to write features in my codebase (which is their latest push).
timgl 32 minutes ago [-]
founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?
blueshoe 2 minutes ago [-]
Couple things for me:
- I missed the default dashboard being my homepage and not having to navigate to it via an extra step. I just noticed that i can change that default, but personally found that a bit annoying largely because I felt lost.
Also i don't like how "People" is not buried in data now, pretty sure this was just in the left hand bar. I can "star" it, but its still nested in a wierd UI drawer. I wish it was pinned by default, or a way I could re-pin it.
A message of some kind (You may have already done this) to accept the new defaults or keep the some of the original defaults would of been cool.
On a broader note, I loved the simplicity of what you guys made, and it feels like the product has too many moving pieces available to me. I build my own product as well and I get the rub here, you want to support so many more use cases and re-organize things to do so , but in the end it feels bloated. I love the idea of using AI and in some cases when i needed to mine my data some it was super nice, though most of the time from a founder perspective I'm looking at largely the same data/metrics over and over, and don't need to be creating new graphs every day. So the launchpad /w chatbox as the primary thing as a default feels a bit lost on me.
All that said, I still looooove your product and would still use it 1100 times over GA any day. <3
paulddraper 3 minutes ago [-]
PostHog has always been open source.
Please update title accordingly.
jnstrdm05 40 minutes ago [-]
I just recently switched to posthog self hosted and it works fine
mlnj 10 minutes ago [-]
Spent a day trying to get it running 2-3 weeks back. Gave up after a day.
Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.
eightysixfour 1 hours ago [-]
From the repo you linked:
> This repo is available under the MIT expat license, except for the ee directory (which has its license here) if applicable.
> Need absolutely 100% FOSS? Check out our posthog-foss repository, which is purged of all proprietary code and features.
carimura 1 hours ago [-]
The PostHog Enterprise license (the “Enterprise License”)
coloneltcb 51 minutes ago [-]
Open* is not Open
mrcwinn 58 minutes ago [-]
It's hard for me to express how much I dislike their marketing website. Sometimes when you have a "cool idea" you should sit with it a moment and then pull back.
sv123 46 minutes ago [-]
I'm a fan of the posthog product but agree with the site. I appreciate the retro styling and all but opening all the windows for everything is disorienting and kinda breaks web navigation that we have all gotten used to for the past 30 years.
shshsjsj 37 minutes ago [-]
wait i don’t see this happening!
nightpool 25 minutes ago [-]
Needs (2020) I guess?
drcongo 1 hours ago [-]
The sheer number of files in the root of that project is making my OCD itch like crazy. That would drive me insane.
mariusandra 48 minutes ago [-]
um... we've had this posthog-foss repo for years now. No idea why it made front page. This is not news.
Source: I was there
To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.
xnorswap 1 hours ago [-]
The AGENTS.md is interesting, apparently the primary most important principle is, "Avoid em-dashes like the plague".
That's an odd request. I always use my own voice for certain things, such as posting to hacker news, or writing my thoughts on a proposal. But for other things such as writing up a bugfix, if I'm getting an AI to write it, I'd rather not hide the fact I've done so.
In fact I usually go out my way to mark it as AI written, to give a heads up to any human reader so they don't waste their time if they don't want to read it.
edit: I'm not sure why my comment is attracting downvotes, perhaps it's being interpreted as anti-AI. I'm not against AI writing, but there are contexts where people would like to know whether something is AI written or not. I would rather it was well identified than hidden, so people can make their own judgement whether to gain insight into a human writing or whether it's just process they can skim or feed through their own agent.
"Avoid em-dashes" just seems like a crude attempt to avoid AI writing coming across as such.
bachittle 1 hours ago [-]
...and then scroll down a few lines and you will find tons of em-dashes in the AGENTS.md
threatofrain 1 hours ago [-]
Very interesting but why would they do this?
khurs 1 hours ago [-]
So non-posthog employees contribute and they can move faster?
solarkraft 1 hours ago [-]
Congratulations!
jaffa2 50 minutes ago [-]
in the youtube video, by 'product' do they mean 'website' ?
I feel I'm missing some basics as to what this can do for me or what problem it solves.
edit so it's like google analytics .
ramon156 58 minutes ago [-]
I have a weird memory of PostHog.
I remember applying sometime ago, not really knowing what they did. They then spammed me with marketing mail, now they're open-sourced and had received a (supposedly marketing) job posting?
Granted in this entire history I had no idea what their product was. Seems flakey, but I haven't used it.
gavinray 44 minutes ago [-]
Why would you apply to a job for a company you don't even know what they do?
lucyjojo 38 minutes ago [-]
money?
Rendered at 16:21:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
In their rationale for this:
> We also learned that the tools to do that automation just don't exist. We kept finding new failure modes. When onboarding a new customer we would have to vet their engineering team for Kubernetes experience so that we'd be confident they could help us debug issues in their PostHog deploy. Folks that didn't have infra experience would often be able to get something set up, only to get stuck when something went wrong.
I empathize that this is a sane choice for PostHog to make as a business. But - if you can't deploy and dogfood your changes, are you truly able to maintain a fork with customizations? And if you can't use your own changes, is the software open-source, or source-available?
Perhaps the punchline is that any scalable & performant web analytics platform must necessarily be a distributed system of ingestion and storage services, and that complexity is like oil and water with the classic "you should be able to swap out the dependencies on your systems with ones you fork" open-source ethos.
PostHog had an opportunity to break this trend, to innovate and invest in those automations they correctly said didn't exist - and I was cheering them on. I've been saddened to see them move in the opposite direction.
It's still great to make the code open, but it's not usable anymore for a self-hosted setup.
But now AI screwed them over so they come with their own open-source spaghetti.
I think is a bit of product slopification.
Also i don't like how "People" is not buried in data now, pretty sure this was just in the left hand bar. I can "star" it, but its still nested in a wierd UI drawer. I wish it was pinned by default, or a way I could re-pin it.
A message of some kind (You may have already done this) to accept the new defaults or keep the some of the original defaults would of been cool.
On a broader note, I loved the simplicity of what you guys made, and it feels like the product has too many moving pieces available to me. I build my own product as well and I get the rub here, you want to support so many more use cases and re-organize things to do so , but in the end it feels bloated. I love the idea of using AI and in some cases when i needed to mine my data some it was super nice, though most of the time from a founder perspective I'm looking at largely the same data/metrics over and over, and don't need to be creating new graphs every day. So the launchpad /w chatbox as the primary thing as a default feels a bit lost on me.
All that said, I still looooove your product and would still use it 1100 times over GA any day. <3
Please update title accordingly.
Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.
> This repo is available under the MIT expat license, except for the ee directory (which has its license here) if applicable.
> Need absolutely 100% FOSS? Check out our posthog-foss repository, which is purged of all proprietary code and features.
Source: I was there
To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.
That's an odd request. I always use my own voice for certain things, such as posting to hacker news, or writing my thoughts on a proposal. But for other things such as writing up a bugfix, if I'm getting an AI to write it, I'd rather not hide the fact I've done so.
In fact I usually go out my way to mark it as AI written, to give a heads up to any human reader so they don't waste their time if they don't want to read it.
edit: I'm not sure why my comment is attracting downvotes, perhaps it's being interpreted as anti-AI. I'm not against AI writing, but there are contexts where people would like to know whether something is AI written or not. I would rather it was well identified than hidden, so people can make their own judgement whether to gain insight into a human writing or whether it's just process they can skim or feed through their own agent.
"Avoid em-dashes" just seems like a crude attempt to avoid AI writing coming across as such.
I feel I'm missing some basics as to what this can do for me or what problem it solves.
edit so it's like google analytics .
I remember applying sometime ago, not really knowing what they did. They then spammed me with marketing mail, now they're open-sourced and had received a (supposedly marketing) job posting?
Granted in this entire history I had no idea what their product was. Seems flakey, but I haven't used it.