Open sourced ?! I believe it was open source from day one.
PostHog FOSS
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: PostHog FOSS
#52I 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.
If you are on react/next.js, defer the client side initialization until after your app has painted. PostHog (especially with their session recording feature) likes to initialize a little before the rest of your app loads through either their context provider or instrumentation.ts (if you are on next.js). It's generally insignificant except if you are building a B2C web app where the extra 100ms makes a difference in retention.
On the server side, queue all analytics call and run them after the main request completes (on next.js it would be within an after() function on the server side).
You can paste this comment into Claude and it should handle the refactor just fine.
Note with the changes in analytics scheduling, you will lose out on real time analytics in favor of better time to first load. So keep the trade-off in mind.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#53I 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.
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).
I'm normally not a fan of AI being shoved into products but I love it in PostHog. I can ask it a product question, ask it to slice and dice data, etc and it does a really good job of sifting through my events, doing analysis, building dashboards, etc. It's normally boring tedious work to do that stuff in PostHog so I'm impressed and glad it works.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#54Does anyone know what the context for this is? Because https://github.com/PostHog/posthog exists as well
From the repo's about section: PostHog FOSS is a read-only mirror of PostHog, with all proprietary code removed. NOTE: This repo is synced automatically from the main PostHog repo. Please raise any issues and PRs there.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#55Last 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”
I think posthog is one of these businesses where the COSS model does not work well.
COSS works well when there is a large distribution advantage of being OSS. This could be bacuse a large portion of users (need to) self-host the solution. This is true for databases, people will always need to self-host dbs (e.g. as part of their docker compose in dev, etc...). These people are also hard core engineers that will 1) talk about the db and 2) contribute to the project. So an OSS db have a large network effects and distribution advantage.
Posthog had a distribution advantage from OSS in their beginnings -- their beachhead was the self-hosting oss community. Now, it does not add much value -- It's unlikely Github adds much for their distribution. So, it does not make sense for them to do much more than just maintain it lightly. In fact, they try to push you from self-hosting by having great free tiers and startup programs.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#56I 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.
I remember around 2 years ago give or take, we used it at a company for A/B testing. The UI was sensible enough. But fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I opened an account and I just could not understand what I saw. I remember it being pretty good, too bad the UI got crappified with AI.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#57I 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.
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).
I recently set up Posthog in production on 3 apps and Posthog's MCP and integrated AI chat were very helpful for onboarding (verifying integrations, setting up and recommending dashboards, debugging an event not being tracked properly, etc).
To each his own though.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#58What the actual fuck is going on with web development nowadays?
Look at the sheer number of ancillary files in this repo:
.agents
.claude
.config
.cursor
.dagster_home
.depot
.flox
.github
.husky
.idea
.interface-design
.pi
.posthog-code
.run
.semgrep
.stamphog
.vscode
.zed
agent-os
bin
cli
common
devenv
docker
docs
frontend
funnel-udf
livestream
nodejs
packages/quill
patches
playwright
posthog
products
proto
rust
services
share
terraform
tools
.cursorignore
.cursorrules
.dockerignore
.editorconfig
.env.development
.env.example
.env.local.example
.env.services
.envrc
.git-blame-ignore-revs
.gitattributes
.gitignore
.kearc
.mcp.json
.nvmrc
.oxfmtrc.json
.oxlintrc.json
.stylelintignore
.stylelintrc.js
.test_durations
.test_quarantine.json
.watchmanconfig
.worktreeinclude
.worktreelink
AGENTS.md
AI_POLICY.md
CHANGELOG.md
CLAUDE.md
CONTRIBUTING.md
Dockerfile
Dockerfile.llm-analytics
Dockerfile.ml-mirror-image-scrub
Dockerfile.node
Dockerfile.playwright
Dockerfile.recording-rasterizer
Dockerfile.sandbox
LICENSE
README.md
conftest.py
dagster_cloud.yaml
depot.json
dist-workspace.toml
docker-compose.base.yml
docker-compose.dev-full.yml
docker-compose.dev.yml
docker-compose.hobby.yml
docker-compose.multinode-clickhouse.yml
docker-compose.playwright.yml
docker-compose.profiles.yml
docker-compose.sandbox.yml
greptile.json
hogli.yaml
manage.py
otel-collector-config.dev.yaml
package.json
pnpm-lock.yaml
pnpm-workspace.yaml
postcss.config.js
posthog.json
pyproject.toml
pytest.ini
tach.toml
tsconfig.dev.json
tsconfig.json
tsconfig.kea-typegen.json
turbo.json
unit.json.tpl
uv.lock
How can anyone in their right mind look at this kind of setup and feel good about it?
Re: PostHog FOSS
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?
I dont think is something in specific but I used to love the simplicity of PostHog and that's why I pushed my team moving to it from Google Analytics. That has changed though. Last time I used PH, I found myself not finding the things I needed so ended up connecting the mcp and asking claude to change things for me. MCP was a nice addition, so thanks for that. The problem of mcp is that it prevents product discoverab…
I've notice that as well. If you don't know how to do something having an agent with tools is great (in general, not just PH). But, its also quite slow and imprecise. I think that having the agent act more as both a teacher and "doer" is best.
Re: PostHog FOSS
#60Hey, Rafa from PostHog here :)
We've always been open source, so I'm not sure I understand what this is about! This is linking to our `posthog-foss` repository which has been a thing for years now, it's simply the main repository without the `ee/` folder - which is not a folder we have a lot inside anyways, we've never tried hiding anything behind it intentionally.
edit: the title originally read "Posthog has been open-sourced" but it's now updated to better reflect what this is about, thanks mods!