Shameless plug - we wrote a blog on setting up an Open Source Analytics Stack with one of our deployments highlighting these issues.
https://dev.to/rudderstack/how-to-build-an-open-source-analy...
PostHog looks awesome!! Congrats on your launch. Would love to collaborate and share notes.
I wouldn't take the self-deprecating language literally. It's probably a useful signal. It communicates "I'm a genuine community member sharing my work with the community" in a way that is hard for spammers to replicate.
They tend to have neither the resources nor knowledge that there's a world out there beyond the regular free to use but you pay with everybody's data and consolidate their power big corp (FB, Google, ...)
I think the way forward would be something akin to CloudFormation with presets on your own server (DO / Scaleway / AWS / ...), something managed over which you still have ownership and can plug off. My axis is particularly around marketing but I suppose you could expand.
PS : I would add Redash to the list of BI tools.
I suppose Singer might be the closest thing from your list above, but still you'd have to build out a large amount of auth & end user tooling to get it to work.
Every B2B SaaS developer these days has to build in a ton of integrations. Even an affordable hosting service for this would work well (embedded integration where you don't require your customer to sign up or pay for a second product).
It's quickly becoming clear (GitLab/Mattermost/Sentry) that there are some great ways to build enormous companies like this though. And, that's of course assuming you want to build a huge company :)
At a personal level, we found that this kind of business is just more fun to build... making cool stuff in the open and if we do a good job, getting inbound interest from bigger companies that have developers who need to use our tech at scale.
I don't think it'd work for everything - if you are a tool that developers don't interact with much, then I'd imagine it's tougher to build a real community.
on the other hand, SaaS products are optimized to sell to business groups who want the hard parts taken care of for them and they perceive value in saving time/money thanks to the SaaS product. I've seen both situations (monetizing open source versus monetizing a SaaS product) first hand, and it's clear that open source companies can be at a bit of a disadvantage. If they DO monetize their users, it's usually via their own SaaS offering to augment the open source tool.
there's a bunch of great hosted tools out there, across ETL, workflows, dashboards, etc. Think Fivetran, Segment, Matillion, Periscope, etc. And then of course the warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, etc.
But I think there are three issues with that stack, roughly like this (I've got to do some more thinking, would appreciate your input):
- Privacy: you have your customer data flying around in all these different tools. it's hard to impossible to track your compliance
- cost: all these vendors charge in some way by data volume, MAUs, etc. - you get taxed multiple times for the same data stream. It all adds up.
- control: your data is subject to pre-determined schemas, proprietary formats, black boxes, etc. - mismatch for the same metric across different tools, less flexibility to manipulate your data and pack up and go elsewhere.
I think there's a valid open source alternative for every layer of the stack:
Segment --> Rudder Labs, Snowplow
Matillion --> Airflow, dbt
Fivetran --> Stitch / Singer
Periscope, Looker, Tableau, etc. --> Metabase, Superset
Warehouses --> just yesterday I learned about materialize.io here on HN
And then add open source products like PostHog, that add additional value for very specific use cases (in this case product analytics).
Not arguing the value of the hosted products. They are amazing to use if you just get started. But there's a great open source "stack" available that long term likely will be more transparent, more flexible, and cheaper.
Would love your thoughts!