Event tracking and analytics is one of those cross-cutting topics I mentioned back in You don’t need to bring out the big guns right away (but it’s good to know them anyway): in the beginning, it doesn’t really matter if or how you do it. Often, you can just hack something together and move on to more important things. For the longest time, for example, poketto.me just had a hard-coded email notification that let me know whenever a new user signed up. That was enough to give me a general sense of what was going on.
Of course, that’s not sustainable. So as things started to take off, I went looking for a simple, free-to-start tool that could grow with poketto.me if needed.
Luckily, I remembered an in-depth evaluation my colleagues at smec had done a few months back. PostHog passed their requirements with flying colors — so I tried it out for poketto.me. Turns out? It’s perfect.
👉 Free to start with very generous (their term!) usage limits
👉 Developer-focused and API-friendly
👉 Built-in support for countless languages and frameworks, including Angular and Python (my stack)
These days, I use it not just for “vanity metrics” (how many users signed up, how many URLs were saved in a day, …), but also for more insightful ones:
➡️How many users keep using poketto.me daily / weekly?
➡️Do we encounter errors fetching content from 3rd-party sites?
➡️How accurate are my predictions about podcast generation time and episode length?
Despite my usual caution against “all-in-one” tools, I’ve come to appreciate PostHog’s approach. I even adopted their feature-flagging system — I didn’t want to add another tool just for a handful of use cases. And it integrates beautifully. Now, for example, I could roll out a new feature only to “everyone using Firefox,” or “those five users,” or “everyone except users in Vienna.” Pretty neat! 🚀