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First-class event retention (TTL) and arbitrary event deletion for self-hosted product analytics

saas real project ••• trending

Operators of self-hosted PostHog can delete a known person and their associated events, but they still lack first-class event retention windows and arbitrary event/event-name deletion for cleanup, retention-policy enforcement, and compliance edge cases. Demand is hot and current: two long-running open issues are collecting fresh +1s from users and customer-facing support threads.

builder note

It reads like a feature request but it's really an operations/compliance product: the +1s cite retention policies, privacy requirements, bad event cleanup, and ballooning ClickHouse storage. The hard part isn't a delete button, it's propagating TTL and targeted deletion across partitions and materialized views, which is precisely why a retention/cleanup layer for self-hosted event stores has room to exist.

landscape (3 existing solutions)

Self-hosted product-analytics stores let you ingest unlimited events but still give operators no first-class way to expire old events or delete arbitrary bad/sensitive event sets. Deletion across a columnar event store with materialized views is genuinely hard, which is why TTL and targeted cleanup stay underbuilt.

PostHog (self-hosted) Supports deleting known persons and their associated events, but not per-project event TTL/auto-expiry or arbitrary event/event-name deletion; teams still hit storage growth, retention-policy, and cleanup/compliance gaps.
Plausible / Matomo Lighter, privacy-friendly analytics with retention controls, but not full product analytics (funnels, cohorts, session replay, event pipelines) that PostHog users need.
Mixpanel / Amplitude Offer data-deletion and retention controls, but are cloud SaaS, which defeats the reason these teams self-host in the first place.

sources (2)

other https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/17031#issuecomment... "+1 please implement this. For GDPR reasons this is **very** important" 2026-06-23
other https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/19468 "Posthog currently doesn't allow for the deletion of events" 2023-12-21
analyticsgdprdata-retentionself-hostedcompliance