OpenPanel

OpenPanel is an open-source analytics platform that tells you what people do inside your product, not just how many arrived. Events, funnels, retention, session replay and revenue sit in one dashboard. It tracks without cookies, so there is no consent banner to write, and you can either buy the hosted version or run the whole thing yourself for nothing.

We came to it the long way. Building this publication, we wrote our own analytics: a single database table, a script on the page, a private panel to read it back. One evening’s work, and it answers the three questions we had. It also has no funnels, no retention, no session replay, and it is ours to maintain forever. OpenPanel is the quiet argument against that evening.

The price is the argument. Five thousand events a month cost $2.50. A hundred thousand cost $20. Self-hosting has no ceiling at all. Most small products measure nothing because analytics was priced for companies with a data team, and OpenPanel is priced for one person with a side project. It also ships MCP tools, so you can ask an AI assistant what happened to your signups instead of building another chart to find out.

OpenPanel is not really a discovery any more: 6.2k stars, a thousand-plus projects by its own count, an incumbent in waiting. That is the honest caveat, and it is also why you can hand it your numbers. PainBase tells you whether anyone wants the thing before you build it. OpenPanel tells you what they did with it after. Take the 30-day trial, keep self-hosting as the door you never have to negotiate through, and stop writing your own dashboards. We should have.