No SDK · one HTTP POST
Good tidings
from production.
Tidings is lightweight product analytics for developers and small product teams. Your application POSTs JSON events to one HTTP endpoint — there is no SDK to install — and you read them back as a live event feed, per-user histories, funnels, retention, and dashboards.
Your app POSTs events. Tidings turns them into news you can read — a live feed, user histories, and dashboards without the ceremony.
Ingest
One POST request. That's the whole integration.
No SDK to vendor, no schema to negotiate. Send a name and a distinct_id from any language that speaks HTTP, add properties when you need them, and the news starts arriving.
- Authenticate with a per-project API key
- Attach arbitrary JSON properties to any event
- Events appear in the explorer within seconds
$ curl -X POST $TIDINGS_API/api/v1/events/ \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'X-API-Key: ...' \
-d '{"name":"checkout_completed","distinct_id":"user_42"}'
{"accepted": 1}The day's news from your product
What happened, who did it, and how often — everything downstream of that POST is built for reading, not configuring.
A live wire of events
Events stream into the explorer the moment they arrive. Filter by name, property, or user and watch releases land in real time.
Understand your users
Every event carries a distinct_id, so profiles assemble themselves. Open any user and read their full history, first touch to last.
Dashboards without the ritual
Pin the counts and trends your team actually checks. A dashboard here is a page of answers, not a quarterly BI project.
Compare
Smaller than PostHog. Smaller than Mixpanel. On purpose.
Both are excellent, and both are platforms — session replay, experiments, report builders, warehouses. Tidings does event analytics and stops there, over one HTTP endpoint with no SDK. Here's the spec-level version, including the rows we lose.
Tidings vs PostHog
An honest, spec-level comparison of Tidings and PostHog: integration model, feature surface, self-hosting, and pricing shape — and which one fits your team.
Tidings vs Mixpanel
An honest, spec-level comparison of Tidings and Mixpanel: integration model, analysis depth, data handling, and pricing shape — and which one fits your team.
Pricing
Free while we're in beta
Everything below works today at no charge. The paid shape is where we're headed — early users keep generous limits.
Free
Everything you need to instrument a side project or an MVP.
- 100k events / month
- 1 project, 3 seats
- 30-day event retention
- Live event explorer
Pro
For teams shipping weekly who want history and headroom.
- 5M events / month
- Unlimited projects and seats
- 12-month retention
- Dashboards and saved views
- Priority support
Free while in beta — Pro pricing lands later.
Something else
More volume than Pro, longer retention, SSO, self-hosting, an export we don't have yet? None of it ships today — but what gets asked for most is what gets built next. Tell us what would make Tidings work for you, and we'll tell you honestly whether it's close.
FAQ
Questions people ask before they sign up
Straight answers, including the ones about our competitors.
- What is Tidings?
- Tidings is a lightweight product-analytics service. Your application sends JSON events to a single HTTP endpoint (POST /api/v1/events/) with a per-project API key, and Tidings stores them and shows them back as a live event feed, per-user histories, funnels, retention and path analysis, and dashboards. There is no SDK to install — anything that can make an HTTP request is already integrated.
- Who is Tidings for?
- Tidings is built for developers and small product teams instrumenting a SaaS application, side project, or MVP. It suits teams who want to answer questions like "who used this feature and how often" without adopting a full analytics platform, negotiating a schema, or vendoring a client library. It is not aimed at enterprise analytics teams who need warehouse-scale modelling, attribution, or a data pipeline.
- How is Tidings different from PostHog?
- PostHog is a broad platform: product analytics plus session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, and a data warehouse, available as open source and self-hosted. Tidings does one thing — event analytics — and integrates over plain HTTP rather than a client SDK. Choose PostHog when you want those adjacent products in one tool or need to run analytics on your own infrastructure today. Choose Tidings when you want events in, answers out, and nothing else to configure.
- How is Tidings different from Mixpanel?
- Mixpanel is a mature, closed-source event-analytics product with per-platform SDKs and a deep query surface — cohorts, segmentation, custom reports. Tidings covers the common core of that (event explorer, user profiles, funnels, retention, paths, dashboards) with a much smaller surface area and an HTTP-only integration. Mixpanel is the better fit for large analytics teams with complex reporting needs; Tidings is the better fit for a small team that wants to be instrumented this afternoon.
- Is Tidings good for instrumenting a SaaS product or MVP?
- Yes — that is its primary use case. Send an event name and a stable distinct_id from your backend or frontend and Tidings assembles user profiles automatically. Because integration is one POST request, you can instrument signup, activation, and key feature events in an afternoon, and you can backfill history by sending past timestamps.
- How much does Tidings cost?
- Tidings is in beta and free to use today. The planned Free tier covers 100,000 events per month, one project, three seats, and 30-day event retention. A Pro tier at $29 per month (5 million events per month, unlimited projects and seats, 12-month retention) is planned but not yet available. There is no enterprise plan — if you need higher volume, longer retention, SSO, or self-hosting, email hello@tidingshq.com and say so; what gets asked for most is what gets built next. Early beta users keep generous limits.
- Do I need to install an SDK to use Tidings?
- No. Tidings has no SDK and no client library. You authenticate with a per-project API key in the X-API-Key header and POST a JSON body containing an event name and a distinct_id, optionally with arbitrary JSON properties and an ISO 8601 timestamp. Up to 500 events can be sent in one batched request. Any language that speaks HTTP works.
- How does Tidings handle my data?
- Tidings stores only what your code sends: an event name, a distinct_id you choose, a timestamp, and any JSON properties you attach — plus your account email, name, and organization name. Tidings does not sell your data or train models on it, and never shares your event data with advertisers. The only thing shared is ad attribution, and only for visitors who accepted the cookie banner: Reddit's pixel runs on the marketing site and records page visits there, while the Tidings app loads no Reddit code at all. If such a visitor arrived from a Reddit ad and later creates an account, Tidings' server reports that conversion to Reddit through its Conversions API. What it sends is Reddit's own click id from the ad link, plus a random id generated for that report so the same sign-up can't be counted twice, and nothing else — no email address, phone number, IP address, user agent, or account id — and a visitor who arrived organically has no click id, so nothing is stored and nothing is sent. Reddit's own pixel script has an account-level setting that can collect an email address shown on the page; Tidings keeps it switched off and checks it on every deploy. Event retention is set per project (30 days by default, configurable up to 730) and events past that window are permanently deleted by a daily purge. Deleting a project permanently deletes its events, users, and API keys.
Read the docs, then delete half your analytics code
Quickstart
From zero to your first event on a dashboard in under five minutes.
Events API reference
The full shape of POST /api/v1/events/ — payloads, properties, responses.
Set up with AI
Hand the integration to Claude Code or Cursor — a prompt, an AGENTS.md, and /llms.txt.
Connect AI agents (MCP)
Let Claude or Cursor read your product data — one endpoint, a personal access token, sixteen tools.