4 ms·

PostHog FOSS

94 points by thatxliner 3mo ago

thatxliner 3mo ago
Does anyone know what the context for this is? Because https://github.com/PostHog/posthog https://github.com/PostHog/posthog exists as well
- lfittl 3mo ago
  My assumption is that its based on that repo but with the "ee/" folder removed, per https://github.com/PostHog/posthog#open-source-vs-paid https://github.com/PostHog/posthog#open-source-vs-paid Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.
- eightysixfour 3mo 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 3mo ago
  The PostHog Enterprise license (the “Enterprise License”)
  - coloneltcb 3mo ago
    Open* is not Open
- theHocineSaad 3mo ago
  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.
drcongo 3mo ago
The sheer number of files in the root of that project is making my OCD itch like crazy. That would drive me insane.
threatofrain 3mo ago
Very interesting but why would they do this?
- khurs 3mo ago
  So non-posthog employees contribute and they can move faster?
- ctxc 3mo ago
  It was always this way!
xnorswap 3mo 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 3mo ago
  ...and then scroll down a few lines and you will find tons of em-dashes in the AGENTS.md
madjam002 3mo 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”
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  we went from batteries not included to BYOAi
- geekuillaume 3mo 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.
- sskates 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lta 3mo ago
    How is this relevant ? We're talking about open source analytics, and this looks like a shameless plus
    - ctxc 3mo ago
      Yeah weird, bc I just checked and it isn't oss. Only the SDKs are OSS, which...doesn't help much
  - victorbjorklund 3mo ago
    So the solution to ”this open source project is really bad at self-hosting” is ”let’s use a 100% proprietary system that does not allow any self-hosting at all”?
solarkraft 3mo ago
Congratulations!
mrcwinn 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
    wait i don’t see this happening!
  - osigurdson 3mo ago
    I don't think it is meant to be objectively the most efficient interface. It is more about being remarkable in a Seth Godin sense. For me I just want things to be blazing fast inside the dashboard.
ramon156 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Why would you apply to a job for a company you don't even know what they do?
  - lucyjojo 3mo ago
    money?
  - eudamoniac 3mo ago
    I apply to the salary. If I get a callback then I'll see what the company does.
jaffa2 3mo 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 .
mariusandra 3mo 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.
gagan2020 3mo 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 3mo ago
  PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.
  - mooreds 3mo ago
    I thought the same thing. What changed, if anything?
    - robbie-c 3mo ago
      Nothing has changed, just OP found the mirror of the main repo with the ee/ folder removed. That repo has been up for most of the lifetime of the company.
  - opem 3mo ago
    Exactly, I was thinking this too!
  - ameliaquining 3mo 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.
  - stronglikedan 3mo 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.
jnstrdm05 3mo ago
I just recently switched to posthog self hosted and it works fine
- mlnj 3mo ago
  Spent a day trying to get it running 2-3 weeks back. Gave up after a day.
heyheyhouhou 3mo 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.
- timgl 3mo ago
  founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?
  - blueshoe 3mo 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 3mo 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.
nightpool 3mo ago
Needs (2020) I guess?
paulddraper 3mo ago
PostHog has always been open source. Please update title accordingly.
mips_avatar 3mo 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.
- HawtAds 3mo ago
  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.
ben8bit 3mo ago
I'm surprised - weren't they always OSS?
raffraffraff 3mo ago
Lol, is github down again?
theHocineSaad 3mo ago
Open sourced ?! I believe it was open source from day one.
wackget 3mo ago
What 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 What percentage of those files are actually directly related to the source code of the software? 1%? How can anyone in their right mind look at this kind of setup and feel good about it?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- muzzkhan 3mo ago
  [flagged]
rbaudibert 3mo ago
Hey, 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!
- thatxliner 3mo ago
  Oh thanks for the clarification

94 points by thatxliner 3mo ago

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

lfittl 3mo ago
My assumption is that its based on that repo but with the "ee/" folder removed, per https://github.com/PostHog/posthog#open-source-vs-paid https://github.com/PostHog/posthog#open-source-vs-paid Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.
eightysixfour 3mo 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 3mo ago
The PostHog Enterprise license (the “Enterprise License”)
- coloneltcb 3mo ago
  Open* is not Open
theHocineSaad 3mo ago
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.

drcongo 3mo ago

The sheer number of files in the root of that project is making my OCD itch like crazy. That would drive me insane.

threatofrain 3mo ago

Very interesting but why would they do this?

khurs 3mo ago
So non-posthog employees contribute and they can move faster?
ctxc 3mo ago
It was always this way!

xnorswap 3mo 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 3mo ago
...and then scroll down a few lines and you will find tons of em-dashes in the AGENTS.md

madjam002 3mo 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”

cyanydeez 3mo ago
we went from batteries not included to BYOAi
geekuillaume 3mo 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.
sskates 3mo ago
[flagged]
- lta 3mo ago
  How is this relevant ? We're talking about open source analytics, and this looks like a shameless plus
  - ctxc 3mo ago
    Yeah weird, bc I just checked and it isn't oss. Only the SDKs are OSS, which...doesn't help much
- victorbjorklund 3mo ago
  So the solution to ”this open source project is really bad at self-hosting” is ”let’s use a 100% proprietary system that does not allow any self-hosting at all”?

solarkraft 3mo ago

Congratulations!

mrcwinn 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  wait i don’t see this happening!
- osigurdson 3mo ago
  I don't think it is meant to be objectively the most efficient interface. It is more about being remarkable in a Seth Godin sense. For me I just want things to be blazing fast inside the dashboard.

ramon156 3mo 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 3mo ago
Why would you apply to a job for a company you don't even know what they do?
- lucyjojo 3mo ago
  money?
- eudamoniac 3mo ago
  I apply to the salary. If I get a callback then I'll see what the company does.

jaffa2 3mo 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 .

mariusandra 3mo 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.

gagan2020 3mo 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 3mo ago
PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.
- mooreds 3mo ago
  I thought the same thing. What changed, if anything?
  - robbie-c 3mo ago
    Nothing has changed, just OP found the mirror of the main repo with the ee/ folder removed. That repo has been up for most of the lifetime of the company.
- opem 3mo ago
  Exactly, I was thinking this too!
- ameliaquining 3mo 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.
- stronglikedan 3mo 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.

jnstrdm05 3mo ago

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

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

heyheyhouhou 3mo 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.

timgl 3mo ago
founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?
- blueshoe 3mo 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 3mo 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.

nightpool 3mo ago

Needs (2020) I guess?

paulddraper 3mo ago

PostHog has always been open source. Please update title accordingly.

mips_avatar 3mo 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.

HawtAds 3mo ago
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.

ben8bit 3mo ago

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

raffraffraff 3mo ago

Lol, is github down again?

theHocineSaad 3mo ago

Open sourced ?! I believe it was open source from day one.

wackget 3mo ago

What 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 What percentage of those files are actually directly related to the source code of the software? 1%? How can anyone in their right mind look at this kind of setup and feel good about it?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
muzzkhan 3mo ago
[flagged]

rbaudibert 3mo ago

Hey, 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!

thatxliner 3mo ago
Oh thanks for the clarification