Feature Guide

How to build
Usage Analytics & Dashboards

Product analytics, usage tracking, dashboards, and reporting for both internal teams and customer-facing metrics.

intermediate
2–4 weeks (manual)
3–7 days (with AI)

Best tools to use

[01]

PostHog

Open-source product analytics. Event tracking, funnels, and feature flags.

[02]

Tinybird

Real-time analytics API on ClickHouse. Great for customer-facing dashboards.

[03]

Plausible/Umami

Privacy-first web analytics. Good for marketing page tracking.

[04]

Custom with PostgreSQL

Aggregate queries on your existing database. Works for simple metrics.

[05]

Mixpanel

Event-based analytics with funnels, cohorts, and retention analysis.

Key considerations

  • ✓Separate product analytics (internal) from customer-facing dashboards
  • ✓Use event-based tracking, not page-view only
  • ✓For customer-facing analytics, use a columnar DB (ClickHouse, Tinybird) — PostgreSQL won't scale
  • ✓Implement server-side tracking for accuracy (ad blockers block client-side)
  • ✓Cache dashboard queries aggressively — analytics queries are expensive

Common mistakes

  • ✗Tracking everything (data overload, slow queries)
  • ✗Only client-side tracking (30-40% blocked by ad blockers)
  • ✗Running analytics queries on your production database
  • ✗No data retention policy (storage costs grow forever)
  • ✗Building dashboards without caching (slow page loads)

Products that nailed this

PostHog
Mixpanel
Amplitude
Plausible

Related features

subscription billingnotification system

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