PostHog is now up to 80% cheaper

Jun 21, 2024

tl;dr

• You can now use PostHog's product and web analytics for up to 80% less, making us cheaper than any popular competitive product.

• This is possible because we've introduced new event processing option that allows you to capture events without person information.

• Previously we processed every event with person information. Now, you can choose when you need this level of detail for a person you are tracking.

• This allows us to reduce our costs for events that do not need person information. We're passing this saving onto our customers.

• We've split the prices for existing customers, so you'll see an extra line item called "Person profiles" on your invoice. Your overall price has not gone up, it's simply split between the new base event price and the person profile add-on.

Pricing before and after

Note: We can offer further discounts if you are beyond 250M events/month regardless. At that scale, we suggest you talk to us.

Who is this for?

Anyone who:

• Isn't tracking an existing high-volume event because it would be prohibitively expensive.

• Has a marketing or content website with lots of anonymous traffic.

• Is tracking API or server events, especially at high volumes.

• Is price-sensitive and is willing to lose some functionality for lower bills.

• Would like to use autocapture to track events, but has turned it off to save money.

How we compare to our competitors

• This makes us the best value popular (>$10M in revenue) product analytics software by a long way.

• Apart from being more expensive, everyone else also has far fewer features available in their free or lower-priced tiers – we only limit team-oriented features, like advanced permissioning.

• Direct comparisons are tricky because most alternatives don't publish their full pricing, but below you can see how the new pricing options compare to Mixpanel.

What's the downside of sending this type of event?

There are some limitations with the new event type. You cannot:

• Filter on persons.
• Create cohorts filtered on person properties.
• Target by person properties for feature flags, A/B tests and surveys.
• Receive initial UTM values for tracking marketing campaign performance (only the most recent).
• View a person’s profile in the app, or query the persons table in our SQL insights.
• Use groups functionality on standard events (without person profiles).

If you need the above functionality, just continue to send person information with your events (no need to change anything), for events where the specific functionality is needed.

Person profiles are not an all-or-nothing thing; you can use them on any traffic where you need more detailed information, and skip them when you don't need that detail.

How do I start using this new processing option?

For most people, it only requires a simple config change to include process_persons: "identified_only".

This will track anonymous traffic without person profiles, and start collecting person information any time an identifying action is taken (i.e. using identify(), group(), setting person properties with $set, etc).

You can get instructions for this and other use cases in our persons documentation.

Is this change sustainable?

Yes! Here's why:

• We're far efficient than any of our major competitors – we are 100% inbound, so we don't need to pay for an outbound sales team, and grow through word of mouth.

• This pricing still reflects us making a positive margin on every event sold. We don't believe in loss leaders.

• We believe this will increase our word-of-mouth growth and improve our retention, so we'll likely to make more revenue with this change, but at a lower margin.

• The majority of our customers use multiple products that we offer, so we wind up making a little money off a lot of products - our competitors are not as wide, so we believe long term we can undercut.

Will my bill go up if I continue to use person profiles?

• No. We've split the historical pricing between the base event cost and the person profiles cost.
• You'll see a new line item on your invoice, but your overall event price won't go up even if you continue to use person profiles on every event.
• You can only save money with this new option.

Why aren't you making the events with person profiles cheaper?

• Because events with person profiles cost a lot more for us to ingest and query.

• Allowing customers to choose to not send person profiles for certain event types means we can cut our own costs of providing our product to our customers, and pass that saving onto them.

• This aligns our interests with our customers, and means we can make a positive margin on all events ingested (beyond our free tier), so it is sustainable but not greedy!