> That means we call it a hobby instance because it just doesn’t scale very well.
Well you guys almost certainly operate posthog in Kubernetes yourselves. You either use a cloud-provided database, or you use a Kubernetes operator to run it on top of someone's infrastructure. Clickhouse, Kafka, whatever. They all have operators. I don't know when you adopted Temporal. Whatever. I may not be 100% right, but this is true in general.
The hobby offering doesn't have to scale poorly. It could scale just as well as your core offering. I am not saying you should, you are entitled to monetize something. It also doesn't have to be hard to install. You could author a Posthog CRD instead of using Helm as a low budget CRD. Maybe you already have that. Maybe your CRD exists as rows in some database and not in Kubernetes's dataplane. The interesting part of all of this is that you had an intuition that Kubernetes obsoletes a lot of the value proposition of traditional SaaS. The problem is figuring out, well, what IS the value proposition? People will endure a lot of brain damage to save on recurring costs, it is totally rational.
Another POV is this shows the limitations of Y Combinator's offering. It's true that enterprise sales goes way faster when it's startup CEO to startup CEO. Until you guys are worth billions of dollars, and even then, it's not 100%, your counterpart at a Fortune 1000 might be some CTO, some managing director with no real decisionmaking power. But he asks his team to pay the contractors in Pakistan to take the brain damage of self hosting Posthog and reimplementing your premium features, all because he cannot get meaningful approval for unlimited, use-based pricing, and then if you acquiesce to fixed pricing, you leave so much money on the table, and you sign up to dedicate a whole engineer to their customization and problems. While Kubernetes isn't to blame for this, it did make the Pakistan BANTA possible, and probably brought down pricing by a lot, hurting everyone trying to make good software for money. Very, very tough situation.
Something I can't really figure out is why Posthog hasn't gotten on Bitnami's (VMWare's) radar. Piwik and Matomo are. Mirantis has a great Kubernetes distribution, maybe the most painless one for people who are willing to take brain damage, and they could wind up doing this too. As always OSS is a value for someone else's thing that that someone else didn't pay for.