PostHog

PostHog is the open-source product-analytics platform founded in **2020 by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser** in London — a Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch alumnus that built one of the most successful B2B-software launches on Hacker News since 2012. The product combines product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, heatmaps, data warehouse, and customer data infrastructure into a single integrated platform; PostHog reports that 98% of customers use the free tier and operates entirely on usage-based pricing ($0.00005 per event for analytics, $0.005 per session-replay recording). For an EU-sovereignty audit PostHog falls into the `eu_hq_us_funded` ownership tier. The HQ is London (UK post-Brexit jurisdiction with EU adequacy decision), but the cap table is heavily US-VC: **Y Combinator** (the canonical Silicon Valley accelerator) led the initial investment and **GV (Google Ventures)** led the $12M Series A; notable angels include Jason Warner (former GitHub CTO), Solomon Hykes (Docker founder), and David Cramer (Sentry founder). For the managed cloud, customers pick between **US (Virginia)** and **EU (Frankfurt)** hosting regions at signup — EU-region customers get GDPR-aligned residency, but the vendor's UK jurisdiction + US-VC ownership + AWS Frankfurt hosting (under PostHog's parent entity) keep the CLOUD Act flag at `material` under the strict-ownership stance. The **self-host edition is the procurement-grade path** for EU buyers. PostHog publishes the full server-side stack as open source on GitHub under a source-available licence; running it on Hetzner / OVHcloud / Scaleway / STACKIT / private DC delivers full sovereignty by construction. Pricing: free tier (extremely generous — most customers stay on free); usage-based above for both cloud and self-host commercial deployments. Best fit: product teams that want an Amplitude / Mixpanel / Heap replacement with permissive self-host option and don't require an EU-incorporated vendor entity.