Can I vibecode PostHog?
price Freeyou'd save no subscriptionbuild time closest consolation build: one sittingcategory analyticsreplaced by 2 people
NOT REALLY
MOATinfrastructure scaleswitching costs
First-party collection and a dashboard that answers your top five questions is one sitting of work, and PostHog's free tier covers a million events a month before you pay anything. What the bill buys past that is the rest of the platform: session replay, feature flags, SQL over years of events, and ingestion that stays correct while your event schema drifts underneath it.
In-List Ad$79/30 days
promote your product in the vibecoded listThe Build Prompt
copy it and go buildready to paste · 1,353 chars
Build me a self-hosted web analytics box to replace PostHog. Requirements:
- One Node 22 + Express process with better-sqlite3, serving the collector and the
dashboard on port 8787. No frontend framework, no build step, no Docker.
- A tracker.js I paste on my sites: pageviews on load and history change, plus
window.track('signup', { plan: 'pro' }), POSTed to /e on my own domain so
collection stays first-party.
- One SQLite events table: site, event, path, referrer, UTM fields, country from the
proxy header, device class, and a JSON properties blob.
- Count visitors by a daily-rotating salted hash of IP plus user agent, salt in .env.
No cookie, never the raw IP. That is the whole privacy design, keep it.
- Dashboard at / with a date range picker: visitors and pageviews by day, top pages,
referrers, countries, any event split by one property, and a three-step funnel.
- Nightly rollup into a daily-summary table, raw events pruned past the retention
window in .env, /export.csv for the raw rows.
- Basic auth on the dashboard, collector open. No accounts, no telemetry, my box
holds the only copy.
- Out of scope: session replay, feature flags, and stitching one person across
devices. Do not build a plugin system or a warehouse connector.
- README: the snippet to paste, where the SQLite file lives, and how to back it up.In-List Ad$79/30 days
promote your product in the vibecoded listWhat you lose
- ✕Hosted infrastructure and managed operations from PostHog
- ✕The original service's mature integrations and ecosystem
Prior art / alternatives
Why it still works
🏗️ infrastructure scale · ⛓️ switching costs
In-List Ad$79/30 days
promote your product in the vibecoded list