PostHog Open Sourced

73 pointsposted 2 hours ago
by thatxliner
(github.com)

46 Comments

madjam002

an hour 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”

btown

17 minutes ago

It's also worth noting that in 2023 they abandoned their Kubernetes support which was relied upon by a full 3.5% of their users: https://posthog.com/blog/sunsetting-helm-support-posthog

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.

geekuillaume

an hour 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

26 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

23 minutes ago

It seems like an odd thing to run locally with so many dependencies.

cyanydeez

an hour ago

we went from batteries not included to BYOAi

sskates

an hour 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

35 minutes ago

How is this relevant ? We're talking about open source analytics, and this looks like a shameless plus

gagan2020

an hour 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

an hour ago

PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.

stronglikedan

10 minutes ago

Has it? This is from that repo, "PostHog FOSS is a read-only mirror of PostHog, with all proprietary code removed." Seems they have some proprietary code in the non-open-source version.

ameliaquining

15 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.

mooreds

37 minutes ago

I thought the same thing. What changed, if anything?

opem

30 minutes ago

Exactly, I was thinking this too!

mips_avatar

13 minutes ago

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.

heyheyhouhou

an hour 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

44 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).

bredren

3 minutes ago

I used their AI chat last night and I was impressed with the product implementation. I was able to use it to make quick sense of data and even generate prompts to solve problems locally.

IDK what the prior AI behaviors have been, but for me, what they have now is an ~idealized version of AI product.

It is basically what I'd do if they didn't offer it but not as well: export data, import their docs in md., import some industry best practices in analytics into context etc.

Except its all right there. Not sure of the economics of it, as it was on a free account and some reasonably good model was powering the discussion. But it was about as engaged as I've been with an analytics tool.

timgl

44 minutes ago

founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?

blueshoe

14 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

paularmstrong

6 minutes ago

It's all the AI bloat for me. It keeps getting shoved in my face and they _really_ want me to use it. But I neither want nor need it. The product itself was so good that it doesn't need this whole guessing-machine-layer on top of it.

I also agree that the nav, structure, and defaults changing keep being un-intuitive and are making it harder to find the things that I use and that matter to me and my orgs.

ben8bit

10 minutes ago

I'm surprised - weren't they always OSS?

jnstrdm05

an hour ago

I just recently switched to posthog self hosted and it works fine

mlnj

22 minutes ago

Spent a day trying to get it running 2-3 weeks back. Gave up after a day.

mrcwinn

an hour 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

an hour 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

an hour ago

wait i don’t see this happening!

paulddraper

15 minutes ago

PostHog has always been open source.

Please update title accordingly.

thatxliner

2 hours ago

Does anyone know what the context for this is? Because https://github.com/PostHog/posthog exists as well

eightysixfour

2 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

2 hours ago

The PostHog Enterprise license (the “Enterprise License”)

drcongo

2 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

an hour 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

an hour 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

an hour ago

...and then scroll down a few lines and you will find tons of em-dashes in the AGENTS.md

threatofrain

an hour ago

Very interesting but why would they do this?

khurs

an hour ago

So non-posthog employees contribute and they can move faster?

jaffa2

an hour 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

an hour 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

an hour ago

Why would you apply to a job for a company you don't even know what they do?