Pricing
Observer charges nothing per event, per site, per seat or per feature — because it runs on hardware you already own. The only bill you will ever see for analytics is the one from your VPS provider.
The model
The software
No license fee, no usage fee, no tier gates on features. Heatmaps, replay, funnels, alerts, MCP — all in the box.
Never billed for
The infrastructure
A 2 vCPU / 4 GB VPS plus disk headroom. Scales with your traffic — and stays flat, because retention is TTL-enforced.
Typical bill includes
The alternative
Verified SaaS pricing for the same 60M-event volume — with cookies, consent banners and your data on someone else's servers.
Verified at this volume
Three-year math
Same 60M events/month, held flat for three years — conservative, because most traffic grows.
| Platform | 3-year total | |
|---|---|---|
| Observer (self-host) | ≈ €2,200–3,200 | |
| Umami Cloud Business | ≈ $43,200 | |
| Matomo On-Premise Business | ≈ €52,200 | |
| Vercel Web Analytics Pro | ≈ $65,500 | |
| PostHog cloud | ≈ $106,200 |
What's included
No feature sits behind a tier, a credit card or a sales call. The complete 53-capability catalog ships in one deployment.
Session timelines with tab-split lanes, click/scroll heatmaps, rage and dead clicks, frustration leaderboard, form drop-off, sandboxed replay.
Overview, realtime, pages, acquisition, goals, funnels, CWV p50–p95, anomaly cards, deploy diff, Ask bar.
Alert rules (6 × 4 ops, cooldowns), weekly digest, Slack + webhooks, share snapshots, GA import, surveys, segments.
Scoped API keys with allowlists, 10+2 public endpoints, 15-tool MCP server, RBAC, 2FA, audit log.
Unlimited sites, unlimited team members, unlimited events — bounded only by the hardware you chose.
Not a tier, not an upsell — the foundation: rotating identity, k-anonymity, audit log, posture page, CI-tested refusals.
Why SaaS must meter
A SaaS vendor runs your ingest, storage and queries on their bill — so they price per event, cap features by tier and quote enterprise at high volume. That is structural, not greedy. Self-hosting inverts it: your infra exists anyway, so the marginal event costs nothing.
| Cost pattern | SaaS analytics | Observer (self-host) |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic doubles | Bill doubles | Bump the VPS if — and only if — needed |
| Add a site | Per-site or volume tier | €0 |
| Invite the team | Per-seat | €0 |
| Unlock heatmaps / replay | Higher tier or paid plugin | Already included |
| Data location | Their cloud, their region | Your racks, your rules |
| Volume caps | Sampling at scale | None — your headroom decides |
License & access
Observer v0.1.0 runs in production today; the open-source decision is pending. If you want the deepest legal analytics on your own hardware, reach out — we onboard teams directly, and after NDA and licensing we provision a guided evaluation directly on your infrastructure.
Everything else is a meter. Point your server at Observer and stop renting your own data back.