Marketing
July 17, 2025
This guide offers a comprehensive analysis of PostHog's costs, covering its pricing plans, integration process, and long-term maintenance needs. Talk to a PostHog expert at MetaCTO to see how we can seamlessly integrate powerful analytics into your app.
Chris Fitkin
Founding Partner
In the world of product development, understanding your users is not just an advantage; it is a necessity. Data-driven decisions separate products that flourish from those that founder. PostHog has emerged as a formidable analytics platform, giving teams the tools to dissect user behavior, run experiments, and improve their products. But with any powerful tool, a critical question arises: what is the true cost?
This cost extends beyond a simple price tag. It encompasses the financial outlay for the service, the technical resources required for integration, and the ongoing effort needed for maintenance. This article provides a comprehensive breakdown of the real cost of implementing PostHog. We will explore its flexible pricing model, detail the steps involved in integrating it with your application, and discuss the often-overlooked costs of maintenance and the expertise required to get it right. For companies looking to harness the full potential of PostHog without getting bogged down in the minutiae, understanding this complete picture is the first step toward making a sound strategic investment.
PostHog’s pricing philosophy is built on accessibility and scalability, which is why more than 90% of companies use the platform for free. The model is designed to grow with you, offering a substantial free tier that allows startups and small projects to get started without any financial commitment, while providing a clear, usage-based path for when your needs expand.
For many, the PostHog journey begins and continues on the Free plan. It is a genuinely free offering that does not require a credit card to sign up. This plan is remarkably generous and includes everything you need to start gathering valuable insights.
What’s included in the Free Plan:
Data retention on the Free plan is one year for all data except for session recordings, which are kept for one month on Clickhouse-based installations. This is typically more than enough to analyze trends and user behavior for early-stage products.
A core component of PostHog’s pricing is the monthly free volume that applies to all plans, including the Pay-as-you-go option. This free allowance resets every month, and you retain it even if you upgrade to a paid tier. This means you always get a significant amount of usage for free before any billing occurs.
Here is a breakdown of the free monthly limits for each product:
| Product | Free Monthly Limit |
|---|---|
| Product Analytics | 1 million events |
| Session Replay | 5,000 recordings |
| Feature Flags & Experiments | 1 million requests |
| Error Tracking | 100,000 exceptions |
| Surveys | 250 responses |
| Data Warehouse | 1 million rows |
| Identified Events | 1 million events |
| Group Analytics | 1 million events |
| Data Pipelines | 1 million events |
| Mobile Session Replay | 2,500 recordings |
| Anonymous Events | 1 million events |
When your usage exceeds the free tier limits or you need access to more advanced features, you can move to the Pay-as-you-go plan. This plan still starts at $0/month; you pay nothing if your usage remains within the free allowances. A credit card is only required when you need to scale up, access premium features, or create more projects.
The Pay-as-you-go plan enhances the PostHog experience with several key benefits:
Critically, you only pay for the products you use and only for the volume that surpasses the free tier. To prevent any surprises, you can set billing limits for each product, giving you complete control over your spending.
For those on the Pay-as-you-go plan, understanding the tiered pricing structure is key to forecasting costs. As your volume increases, the per-unit cost decreases, making the platform more economical at scale. All prices are in US Dollars (USD) and exclude taxes.
Product Analytics is the core of PostHog. This includes several event types, each with its own pricing structure after the generous free tier.
For general analytics events (including anonymous events) beyond the free tier, the pricing is as follows:
| Monthly Event Volume | Price per Event |
|---|---|
| First 1M | Free |
| 1M - 2M | $0.0000500 |
| 2M - 15M | $0.0000343 |
| 15M - 50M | $0.0000295 |
| 50M - 100M | $0.0000218 |
| 100M - 250M | $0.0000150 |
| 250M+ | $0.0000090 |
Pricing for other event types follows a similar tiered structure, starting at $0.000198/event for Identified Events, $0.000071/event for Group Analytics, and $0.000062/event for Data Pipelines after their respective free tiers.
Session Replay allows you to watch recordings of user sessions to understand their experience firsthand.
| Monthly Recordings | Price per Recording |
|---|---|
| First 5,000 | Free |
| 5k - 15k | $0.0050 |
| 15k - 50k | $0.0035 |
| 50k - 150k | $0.0020 |
| 150k - 500k | $0.0017 |
| 500k+ | $0.0015 |
For Mobile Session Replays, the first 2,500 recordings per month are free, with subsequent recordings starting at $0.01 each.
Feature Flags and Experiments are billed together based on the number of API requests.
| Monthly Requests | Price per Request |
|---|---|
| First 1M | Free |
| 1M - 2M | $0.000100 |
| 2M - 10M | $0.000045 |
| 10M - 50M | $0.000025 |
| 50M+ | $0.000010 |
Collect direct feedback from your users with in-app or link-based surveys.
| Monthly Responses | Price per Response |
|---|---|
| First 250 | Free |
| 250 - 500 | $0.200 |
| 500 - 1k | $0.100 |
| 1k - 10k | $0.035 |
| 10k - 20k | $0.015 |
| 20k+ | $0.010 |
Sync data from external sources to analyze alongside your product data.
| Monthly Rows Synced | Price per Row |
|---|---|
| First 1M | Free |
| 1M - 10M | $0.000015 |
| 10M - 100M | $0.000010 |
| 100M+ | $0.000008 |
Monitor and debug issues in your application.
| Monthly Exceptions | Price per Exception |
|---|---|
| First 100,000 | Free |
| 100k - 325k | $0.000370 |
| 325k - 10M | $0.000140 |
| 10M+ | $0.000115 |
For teams that require enhanced capabilities, PostHog offers several platform add-ons:
These add-ons provide advanced features related to collaboration, data governance, and performance for larger organizations.
Finally, for non-profits, PostHog offers a 25% discount off any plan in most cases, furthering its commitment to making powerful analytics accessible to everyone.
While PostHog’s pricing is transparent, the cost of integration is measured in time and technical effort. A proper setup is not merely about dropping a code snippet into your app; it’s about thoughtfully architecting a data pipeline that will yield clean, reliable, and actionable insights for years to come. The integration process, exemplified by tools like PropelAuth that connect with PostHog, involves several key stages.
The first step is establishing the connection between your application and your PostHog account. This is a foundational task that requires technical access to your application’s backend or authentication service.
The real power of PostHog is unlocked when you can tie actions to specific users. A robust integration automates this process, ensuring that every user interaction is correctly attributed.
Generic data is useful, but custom data is transformative. The integration process should include a mechanism for passing custom user properties to PostHog. This is where you can layer your unique business context onto your analytics.
For instance, if you ask users “How did you find out about us?” during signup, you can pass this information to PostHog as a custom property (e.g., referral_source). With this data, you can then build powerful reports in PostHog to analyze user retention based on their self-reported acquisition channel. This allows you to answer critical business questions like, “Do users who found us through a podcast have a higher lifetime value than those who came from a Google search?”
This level of detailed tracking is what separates a basic analytics setup from a strategic business intelligence tool. The integration must be designed to not only capture events but to enrich them with meaningful context.
The initial integration of PostHog is just the beginning. The true, long-term “cost” of any analytics platform lies in its maintenance and the strategic oversight required to ensure the data it produces remains valuable. Without a disciplined approach, your pristine data lake can quickly turn into a data swamp, filled with inconsistent, untrustworthy, and ultimately useless information.
This is where the cost of expertise comes into play. You can have the most powerful analytics tool in the world, but if it’s not configured and maintained correctly, it’s an expensive liability. Let’s explore the best practices required to maintain a healthy PostHog instance—practices that require dedicated effort and knowledge.
clicked-button mean? Which button? On which page? Without a strict, documented naming convention (e.g., Object - Action, like SignupButton - Click), your event list will become a chaotic mess that no one can decipher. Enforcing this requires team-wide discipline and governance.completed_purchase_v2). This prevents new data from corrupting historical analysis and allows you to manage schema changes gracefully.Each of these practices requires foresight, planning, and technical skill—resources that are often in short supply on a busy product team. This is the hidden cost of a “do-it-yourself” approach to analytics.
While one developer noted that the “setup with PostHog was so easy for native development,” this statement highlights an important nuance. The initial SDK installation might be straightforward, but a strategic and robust mobile integration is a far more complex undertaking. Mobile environments introduce unique challenges, from varying operating systems and device types to inconsistent network connectivity and complex app lifecycles. Capturing data reliably in this environment requires deep expertise in mobile app development.
This is where the cost to hire a team—or the value of partnering with an expert agency—becomes a critical part of the equation.
The true cost of PostHog, or any powerful platform, isn’t in the monthly subscription—it’s in the opportunity cost of using it poorly. An improperly configured analytics setup doesn’t just fail to provide value; it can lead you to make wrong decisions based on bad data. The alternative to a risky DIY approach is to leverage the expertise of a specialized agency.
At MetaCTO, we have over 20 years of app development experience, have launched more than 120 successful projects, and have helped our clients secure over $40 million in fundraising. Our role often extends to that of a fractional CTO, where we provide the high-level technical strategy that startups need to thrive. Integrating analytics platforms like PostHog isn’t just a task for us; it’s a core part of our product strategy.
Hiring a full-time data analyst or a developer with deep analytics expertise is a significant financial commitment. Partnering with us provides access to that same level of expertise in a more flexible and cost-effective model. We don’t just install PostHog; we architect an analytics strategy around it. We help you:
Our process, refined through years of building and scaling apps, ensures that your investment in a tool like PostHog yields the highest possible return. We integrate analytics as a fundamental part of our Rapid MVP Development process, ensuring you have the insights you need from the moment you launch.
PostHog stands out as an exceptionally powerful and accessible analytics platform. Its pricing model, with a generous free plan and a transparent pay-as-you-go structure, removes the financial barrier for companies of all sizes. However, the true cost of implementation goes beyond the monthly bill. It includes the technical effort of a thoughtful integration and, most importantly, the strategic discipline required for long-term maintenance.
We have seen that a proper setup involves much more than copying a snippet of code. It requires careful planning around user identification, custom property mapping, and adherence to best practices like event versioning and backend tracking to ensure data integrity. Without this expertise, you risk accumulating noisy, unreliable data that can do more harm than good.
Maximizing your return on an investment in analytics means getting the implementation right from the start. If you want to harness the full power of PostHog without the steep learning curve and potential pitfalls of a DIY setup, expert guidance is invaluable. Talk to a PostHog expert at MetaCTO today. We can help you seamlessly integrate this powerful tool into your product and transform raw data into a clear roadmap for growth.
Last updated: 17 July 2025
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