PostHog gives 1M events a month free and is open source, but says self-hosting is unsupported and practical only under about 300,000 events a month. Mixpanel is $10,080 a year at 10M events. A first-party pipeline on Firehose, S3 and Athena costs a few dollars a month at the same volume. What each one is good at.
Product analytics is the easiest tool to own and the one where owning it matters most. The events are a record of what every user did in your product. They are also the data an AI assistant needs to answer "why did signups drop last week".
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A small SDK that sends typed events to a collector on your own domain (no third-party host for blockers to match).
The collector validates each event and puts it on Amazon Data Firehose.
Firehose writes compressed files to S3, partitioned by day.
Athena queries the files with SQL. Partition projection means a new day is queryable with no crawler.
Dashboards read through your own API, cached for a few minutes.
This is the pipeline behind our own sites. At 10M events a month of about 1KB each, Firehose bills each record in 5KB increments, so ingestion is roughly 50GB, about $1.45 a month. Gzipped storage is a few gigabytes. Each dashboard query scans a few days of partitions, a fraction of a cent.
Session replay and heatmaps. Building replay well is real work; if you need it, keep a tool for replay alone and sample it.
Point-and-click funnels for non-technical users, unless you build the screens. SQL is the interface until then.
Feature flags and experiments, which are a separate system. A simple flag table and a hash-based assignment go a long way.
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As of October 30, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.