New pricing PR

[andyvan-ph]

Changes

New draft based on #8218

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Name	Status	Preview	Updated (UTC)
posthog	✅ Ready (Inspect)	Visit Preview	Jun 25, 2024 5:32pm

[andyvan-ph]

@raquelmsmith @joethreepwood Made some more changes based on feedback + suggestions. Have also changed the order as per Joe's suggestion, so it's now:

• TL;DR
• How much can I save?
• Who is this for?
• What are the downsides?
• Why are we doing this?
• How to use it
• FAQ

[corywatilo]

After chatting with @camerondeleone, I think we should reconsider how we're pitching this or significantly rewrite this post with our customer's mindset in focus.

Having sort of fresh eyes on this (and both looking at this as an outsider, and knowing our intent here), here's a live tweet of my thoughts as I read this post:

• "You can now use our product and web analytics for up to 80% less" is disingenuous (and anti-PostHog's style of writing/honesty). This won't be true for most of our customers, so it's bait-and-switch. Or classic marketing, which we try to avoid.
• "capture events without person data" is in the TL;DR but I, as a reader, don't know what this is yet
• The following TLDR bullets go on to explain the how (the pricing works), but doesn't explain the why
• "How much can I save?" is the next section, which still doesn't tell me what this means to me, as a customer.
• "Who is this for?" starts to help me understand, but I still have to do a lot of the deducing myself, as the primary use cases still haven't been explained.

Focusing on what people understand (without knowing a lot about PostHog) might make more sense:

• If you use PostHog like Google Analytics, you can now save up to 80% by disabling person profiles.
  • This is because this method doesn't capture detailed information about users.
  • It's cheaper for us to process, and we pass the savings on to you.
  • Just change a configuration option to reduce your bill.
• If you use PostHog to track logged in users, your bill will stay the same.
  • No changes are needed.
• If you use PostHog to track both your marketing website (with anonymized data like Google Analytics) and logged in users (like in product analytics), you can likely save some money.
  • You can disable person profiles for your website visitors before they sign up.
  • You can still keep person profiles on logged in users, allowing you to send personally-identifiable information.
  • You can roughly calculate this by [insert math, something about splitting the percentage of website traffic vs logged in traffic x the different rates].
• Either way, you can selectively choose when you want to use person profiles on each event. This means you can enable or disable them at will (like on specific pages or in certain cohorts).

I also think we'd benefit from some better visuals. The graph intends to show it's cheaper if you have a balance, but we're still using the literal terminology rather than explaining why you'd choose each option or how you might be somewhere in the middle – as it takes config changes to achieve it.

So in summary, I strongly think we should restructure this based on use case, rather than trying to educate the world on the new concept of person profiles without explaining it how it might pertain to their lives.

[corywatilo]

Also, what would be super useful to compare is what PostHog web and product analytics costs vs others where you're using two, ie, PostHog vs:

• Vercel Analytics + Mixpanel
• GA 360 + Amplitude
• Plausible + Heap

As an aisde, it would be cool to have a way to punch in your bill from various providers (based on usage) and we'll tell you what you'd pay here. We don't know what they pay but we know what they'd pay here. And maybe we can even get them to tell us. ;)

[corywatilo]

I've added some tangible examples of what I mentioned above to a pricing page panel PR that I think could be useful as inspiration here.

[andyvan-ph]

Thanks for the feedback @corywatilo. You make some excellent points. I know this is not normal practice, but I've opened an issue on the internal repo so people can discuss this a bit more freely / include sensitive info.

Issue here: https://github.com/PostHog/company-internal/issues/1421