Web analytics · cost comparison
Google Analytics 4 vs self-hosted PostHog: what each actually costs
Google Analytics 4 on the Free tier against PostHog running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
There is no bill to beat here. Google Analytics 4 costs nothing at its standard tier, so running PostHog yourself costs you $340 a month more, not less. The reason to do it is who holds the data, not what it costs.
- Google Analytics 4
- $0.00per month, Free
- Self-hosted
- $340server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $115Basic 16 GiB, 16 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $13,447 extra to self-host
- Break-even
- neverafter $1,200 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Google Analytics 4 | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 5 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 10 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 25 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 50 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 100 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
| 250 people | $0.00 | $340 | $115 | Basic 16 GiB (16 GB) | -$13,447 |
Self-hosting never comes out ahead at any team size on this page, once your time is priced in.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $96.00 | Basic 16 GiB at DigitalOcean: 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 320 GB disk |
| Backups | $19.20 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $225 | 3 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $340 | Plus $1,200 once, for roughly 16 hours of first-time setup |
Google Analytics 4 at this size costs $0.00 a month. No licence cost at the standard tier.
What PostHog needs to run at 10 people
Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Redis and several workers. PostHog itself now discourages self-hosting below a substantial scale, and the sizing here reflects that honestly.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 10.2 GB | 8 GB for the stack at rest, plus 15 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 62 GB | 60 GB base, plus 0.2 GB per user |
| vCPU | 4 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Google Analytics 4 has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $19.20 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- PostHog is operationally heavy: several stateful services and an upgrade path that can lose data if you rush it. That is why the maintenance line is 3 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. PostHog covers the core of what teams use Google Analytics 4 for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put PostHog
10.2 GB of memory and 62 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Basic 16 GiB at DigitalOcean for $96.00 a month.
Go to DigitalOcean Compare hosts
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The DigitalOcean link above is a referral link: if you sign up through it and pay your first $25, we receive $25 of DigitalOcean account credit. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
PostHog at a glance
| Licence | Other not a standard open-source licence |
|---|---|
| Written in | Python |
| GitHub stars | 39,757, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | desktop-v0.61.377 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | posthog.com · PostHog/posthog |
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 Free | free at the standard tier | vendor pricing page | 2026-09-12 |
| DigitalOcean Basic 16 GiB | $96.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-12 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| PostHog sizing | 8 GB base, 15 MB per user | project documentation | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-12, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.