PostHog Says Nobody Pays. Raycast Moved the Meter.

3 October 2026 11:57 Will & Brian

PostHog, the product analytics company, now tells you on its homepage that almost nobody pays it, and its own site gives three different numbers for how few. Raycast kept every price and moved the meter underneath its AI instead. Will thinks free on the front page is the strongest positioning in devtools; Brian thinks it is a bill that arrives later.

Sources

Transcript

Click a time to jump there. Times are approximate.

PostHog, the product analytics company, put one line under its sign-up button about three weeks ago: ninety-seven percent of users pay us nothing. No credit card required. Whoever runs marketing at a devtool with a free tier should read that line twice, because I think it's the strongest positioning a developer tool can run right now. It answers the only question a developer has before clicking, which is whether trying this starts a conversation about money.
And I read the same line as ninety-seven people in a hundred being paid for by three, who find out what that costs after they've built on it. So that's the argument: free on the homepage, strongest positioning in devtools or a bill that arrives later. And the same month, another tool a lot of developers live in, Raycast, put a meter on its AI without touching a single price. You first. PostHog, properly. I want to hear you say it's a sales strategy out loud.
It is a sales strategy, and the handbook reads that way. The words are on the page today; the date is our own page monitor's, and I couldn't check it against an archive. Now the handbook, which is public. Their pricing principles put the free tier first: hobbyists, and teams without product-market fit yet, get generous free allowances. Anything that grows word of mouth should be free, which is why they don't charge per seat: more people inside your company using PostHog is, on their logic, more word of mouth. And then the number that makes it a strategy rather than a kindness. They say nearly all their sales are self-serve, and seventy percent of customers find them through word of mouth. PostHog's own figure.
Seventy percent through word of mouth. So the free tier is the sales team.
The free tier is, in effect, the sales team and the ad budget, and the homepage line is the sign on the door for it. The history is one sentence: they started as a subscription with a small free tier, within a year they made the free tier enormous and paired it with usage pricing, and they say that pairing has been the core of their pricing ever since. And the handbook says something about direction. They treat the free tier as a one-way door: easy to raise for existing customers, very painful to lower. If the sign says free, and the company has written down in public that lowering it is very painful, then the sign is credible. That's the positioning. Not cheap. Safe to start.
Safe to start. Let me put my exhibit on the table, and it's from the same company, so you don't get to say I'm comparing apples to... whatever. Two things. First, the ninety-seven. Scroll down the same homepage and it says ninety-eight percent of our customers use PostHog for free. Open the pricing docs and it's more than ninety percent of companies. Users, customers, companies. Three words, three numbers, and none of them says how it's counted or over what period. So it's not a number, it's an adjective. Second thing. PostHog's own newsletter on pricing, by one of their own writers, has a section heading that reads "Charging anything is better than giving it away." Under it, an AI coding startup called Kite that shut down with half a million people using it every month and not paying. So the company whose sign says almost nobody pays has written, in its own voice, that giving the product away is a trap for an early-stage startup. Both are true at once, and I'd like to know which one the homepage is.
They'd say both. The free tier is the door, and the meter is behind it.
Then look where the meter went. Ten days after the homepage changed, our page monitor logged the pricing page changing too, and among the lines that got added are AI lines. Single source again. PostHog AI, a bundle of free credits a month, then a price per credit. And the new Inbox, which is in beta, the self-driving thing that opens pull requests for problems it finds: the first three a month are free, after that fifteen dollars a pull request. Fifteen dollars, on a tool whose sign says ninety-seven percent of you pay nothing. That's not hypocrisy, it's the design. Free where it grows word of mouth, metered where it costs them money. I just think the listener should hear both pages in the same breath, because the homepage is doing a lot of work to make sure you only read one.
Fine. Then tell me Raycast, because the post I read said prices didn't change, so what's the story.
They didn't change, and that's the story. Raycast is a Mac launcher with AI built in, a free plan at the bottom and paid plans above. Around the time PostHog's sign went up, Raycast's CEO published a post, under his own name, on why they're changing how the AI is priced. Every subscription price stays the same, his words, and I checked the pricing page today: Pro is still ten dollars a month. The sign on the door didn't move. What moved is underneath, so follow me for a second. Say you pay Raycast ten dollars a month. Before this, that bought you AI with a rate limit: so many requests an hour, with no allowance to run down. Now the same ten dollars buys an allowance, and a long agent task eats into it. The price tag is identical. What it buys went from a flat fee to a meter.
So same price, but now it runs out.
Now it runs out, and on the old version, from the middle of December, it simply stops when the credits hit zero. Their reason is cost. AI went from one question and one answer to agents running long tasks, their cost went up, their prices didn't, and they'd been eating the difference. Self-reported, and unflattering, so I believe it. Then the second beat. In the new version, bringing your own API key, your own ChatGPT or Claude subscription, a local model on your own machine, every one of those needs a paid plan.
Hold on. I pay them so I can use the key I'm already paying someone else for?
That's the sentence, and the CEO wrote it himself, in the manual: "I can see why 'pay us so I can use my own key' feels strange." His argument is that Raycast should be the interface layer and not the inference layer, so you pay for the interface. Reasonable. So here's the shape, and it isn't the opposite of PostHog's. Same move, both of them. Keep the number on the front reassuring, meter the AI underneath. PostHog's front number is free. Raycast's is ten dollars, and ten dollars is the one people notice when it starts buying something different. Nobody hid anything; Raycast said it in a signed post. The difference is which number is on the front, and that's the thing worth arguing about.
And that's when the famous Mac developer walked out. I saw that thread.
Everyone saw it, and it's the one thing I'd want said carefully. Sindre Sorhus, a well-known open-source developer, posted a few days later that he'd left Raycast for Tinycast, which is free, open source, and runs Raycast extensions. Some of the people in the thread that spread it turned it into a pricing story. He didn't. His own words are that Raycast had become non-native and bad, which points at the new version, a ground-up rewrite around web views so it runs on Windows too, where the old one was native Mac code. That's a product complaint. It landed days after the credits, so it got filed under the credits, and the correct filing is that I can't find a number for how many people left, and Raycast hasn't said.
Which is the honest answer and also the boring one, so here's where I actually stand. A pricing page is the most honest positioning document a company publishes, because it has to say who the product is for in numbers. PostHog just moved one line from the honest page to the loud one. Ninety-seven percent of you pay nothing says: this is for the person who isn't sure yet, come in. And your Raycast story is my evidence, not yours. Raycast is the company that didn't say it. It kept the sign still and moved the meter, and what it got was a thread full of people who felt...
That's the thread I just told you was filed under the wrong thing.
It is. Fine. Then my evidence is the CEO. On the manual page that explains the change, under his own name, he writes that he can see why paying them to use your own key feels strange. That's a company admitting, in its own documentation, that it hadn't explained the change well. Nobody at PostHog is in the manual explaining a feeling, because the front number does the explaining. And Elena Verna, writing from inside Lovable a few weeks ago, where every use costs real money, says "One of the biggest growth levers at Lovable is giving our product away for free." If the people paying the inference bills still say free is the lever, the sign is right. I'd put the free number on every devtool homepage I could get my hands on.
Every homepage, from one company. How do you know it works? As far as I can find, PostHog has said nothing about whether the line moved sign-ups, nothing about what share of its revenue the paying few supply, nothing about how many free ever convert. You're looking at a company that writes a lot about pricing and taking its loudest sentence as the result. And Verna is defending the free tier of the company she works at; of course she is. Although. The bill arriving later isn't the problem. A bill that arrives for the thing that costs the company money, written down in advance, is just pricing. Fifteen dollars a pull request is fine. Credits are fine. What Raycast got wrong isn't charging, and it isn't hiding, because they wrote it all up under the CEO's name. It's that the number on the front was a price, one people had already learned, so when the meter went in underneath, ten dollars started meaning something else and the sign couldn't say so. Free can't do that to you. Free with a meter on the next page is still free. So the sign isn't the bill. The sign is what makes the bill survivable.
You'll wait for PostHog to publish a conversion rate, and they never will, so let me ship something. The version I'd ship is yours and mine on one screen, and it's not the one PostHog shipped. Under the sign-up button, ninety-seven percent of users pay us nothing. Directly under that, what the three percent pay for: the fifteen-dollar pull request, the credit price, the usage line. Resend, the email API, does the plain version on its pricing page: a free tier as the door, then a published table, and a FAQ that says no special pricing for nonprofits or schools, every plan priced the same for every customer, enterprise aside. The number you're worried about, the one with three versions and no denominator, stops mattering the moment the meter is on the same screen. The weak version of the sign is the one that hopes you don't scroll.
And I'd keep the ninety-seven and add how it's counted, which tells you I've come further than you have.
You'd put a footnote on a billboard.
Somebody reads the footnote.

Will and Brian are fictional hosts voiced with ElevenLabs, and the music is made with ElevenLabs; the episode was researched and written by AI agents and fact-checked against the sources above. ElevenLabs is a company this site covers; it is a tool the site pays for, not a sponsor.

transcript as markdown mp3 all episodes