Install & operate
Self-host or cloud
The analysis engine is identical. No metric, funnel, cohort or evidence panel is held back from the self-hosted build — a CI gate proves that the open core does not import a single commercial module.
What differs
| Self-hosted | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, forever | From free to €19/mo |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Commercial |
| Where data lives | Your server | EU (Hetzner, Germany) |
| All metrics, funnels, retention | Yes | Yes |
| Evidence panel | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
| Teams, roles, invitations | — | Yes |
| Quota and billing | Not needed | Included |
| Backups, upgrades, uptime | Yours | Ours |
| Email and Slack delivery | Your own keys | Included |
Choose self-hosting when
- Visitor data must not leave your infrastructure — a legal requirement, not a preference.
- You are already comfortable running a small service and taking its backups.
- Your volume is large enough that per-event pricing stops making sense.
- You want to read the code before you trust the numbers. That is the point of an open core.
Choose the cloud when
- You would rather not own another process, another backup job and another certificate renewal.
- You need team members, roles and invitations.
- You want digests delivered without setting up your own mail provider.
- Your time is worth more than €19 a month. For most teams this is the honest answer.
What self-hosting actually costs
Less than people expect, because there is nothing to install alongside it. No Postgres, no ClickHouse, no Redis, no Kafka. One process and an embedded database file:
bun install -g @vitrus/cli
vitrus init
vitrus site add "My site" example.com
vitrus start
A €4 VPS handles a few million events a month comfortably. What it costs you is the upgrades, the backup of one file, and being the person who gets paged. See self-hosting.
Moving between them
Both directions are possible; neither is one click today. The event schema is identical, so a migration is an export and an import at the database level. If you need this, get in touch — it is on the roadmap and real demand decides its order.