PostHog has two completely different pricing tracks: hosted Cloud at per-event rates, and self-hosted open source for free. The right answer depends on your event volume and whether you have an afternoon to do ops. With the live numbers from posthog.com/pricing.
Most pricing pages give you tiers. PostHog gives you a calculator. The headline numbers from posthog.com/pricing in May 2026: 1M product-analytics events per month free, then $0.00005 per additional event on the hosted Cloud, plus per-product pricing for session recording, feature flags, surveys, and experiments. Or you can run the entire stack yourself, free, on your own infra. This guide does the event-volume math for both tracks so you can pick correctly the first time.
How we got these numbers. All figures pulled from posthog.com/pricing and the docs at posthog.com/docs in May 2026. PostHog updates per-event prices and free tier limits about twice a year. Always re-check before committing.
Cloud is the default for almost everyone. You sign up, drop the JS snippet on your site, and start getting data within minutes. Pricing is per product (analytics, recording, flags, surveys, experiments), each with its own free allotment and per-unit overage rate.
That per-event price is small but it adds up: 1 million events of overage = $50. So a SaaS pulling in 2M events/month total ends up at $50/month for analytics. 5M events lands at roughly $200, though sliding-scale discounts kick in earlier in practice.
The thing that surprises people: PostHog charges only above the included tier. There’s no $50/month base fee — if your real volume is 800K events/month, you legitimately pay $0 forever, with full feature access. That’s aggressive compared to Mixpanel (Free plan caps at 100K events/month and has feature limits).
Session recording is a separate product with its own meter. The 2026 pricing on posthog.com/pricing is roughly 5,000 recordings free per month, then $0.005 per recording after that, again on a sliding scale. A SaaS recording every session at moderate traffic blows past 5,000 recordings within a couple of weeks. This is the single line item that surprises Cloud customers most often.
Feature flags are extremely cheap on PostHog — effectively free up to 1M requests per month, then a small per-request fee. For a typical solo SaaS using flags for staged rollouts, you almost never pay for this product. LaunchDarkly at $20/seat/month for the same use case is dramatically more expensive.
Each has its own meter. Surveys are priced per response (a few cents each above a small free quota). Experiments are priced via the events they generate, not separately. For a solo founder, surveys and experiments rarely cost more than a few dollars/month if used intentionally.
The same product, free forever, if you run it yourself. PostHog open source is at github.com/PostHog/posthog under the MIT license for most of the platform (some enterprise features are source-available, not open source). You deploy it via Docker or Kubernetes, point it at a Postgres + ClickHouse cluster, and pay your hosting bill instead of PostHog’s bill.
The catch: PostHog is a real piece of infrastructure. ClickHouse alone is non-trivial to operate. PostHog’s self-hosted docs guide you through it, but you’re signing up for an ongoing maintenance load: backups, version upgrades, scaling the database when event volume grows, watching disk usage. For a solo founder, that’s real time.
The single biggest mistake founders make is underestimating event volume. Modern PostHog autocapture — the default config that records every click, page view, and form interaction — generates 5–20× more events than founders expect. Here’s what it actually looks like at common stages.
A simple marketing site with autocapture on, getting 2,000 visits/month, generates 30,000–80,000 events. Page views, scroll events, button clicks, form interactions. Cost: $0 on Cloud.
50–100 paying customers, plus marketing site traffic. Logged-in app sessions are event-heavy — every interaction with a button, form, or chart fires events. Realistic monthly volume: 100,000 to 500,000 events depending on how interactive the product is. Cost: $0 on Cloud, easily.
500 customers means 5–10× the in-app activity, plus much heavier marketing site traffic from your growing audience. Realistic volume: 1 to 3 million events per month. Cost: $0 to ~$100/month on Cloud, depending on whether you cross the 1M free line and by how much. Add session recording on top — if you record everything — and you can easily double that.
Cloud is the default. Self-hosted only becomes the right answer when one of these is true:
For 95% of solo founders reading this, none of these apply. Cloud is the right call.
Cloud is the obvious choice when:
The Cloud bill rarely matches the headline analytics rate because of the per-product add-ons. Three to watch closely:
posthog.feature_flags.get_all() on every page load for an unauthenticated marketing site, you can rack up flag-evaluation requests fast.Three things drive PostHog volume way more than founders realize.
PostHog’s autocapture sends events for clicks, form submissions, page views, and rage-click detection. On a moderately interactive marketing site, that’s 10–15 events per page view, not one. Turning off autocapture on marketing pages — and switching to manual posthog.capture() calls for the events you actually care about — can cut your event volume by 80%.
If you use group analytics (per-organization tracking for B2B SaaS), every event is associated with both a user and a group. The event count itself doesn’t double, but query volume can, which affects retention pricing on certain product features.
Default is 100% of sessions. If you set it to 10% (still statistically valuable for spotting UX issues), you cut recording costs by 10×. Few founders adjust this and most should.
PostHog’s bundle of analytics + recording + flags + surveys is unique in the market. The closest alternatives:
The bundle math is why PostHog dominates the solo-founder analytics segment. We covered the qualitative side in our PostHog review; the broader stack lives in the solo founder tech stack guide. If you’re still figuring out which metrics belong on the dashboard at all, start with SaaS metrics that matter.
Use PostHog Cloud, on the Free tier, until you cross 1 million events per month. That moment usually arrives around $5K–$15K MRR for an interactive SaaS. After that, expect $50–$200/month all-in for most solo founders, with session recording typically the largest line item.
Self-hosted PostHog is technically free but operationally expensive for a solo founder. Don’t pick it as a cost-saving move — pick it only when compliance or extreme volume forces your hand. And before either path, take fifteen minutes to disable autocapture on marketing pages and set session recording to 10% sample rate. That single config change is worth more than upgrading any tier.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.