Compare & limits
Hotjar, FullStory, LogRocket, and PostHog are excellent, mature tools, and Microsoft Clarity is free forever. GhostView is early and deliberately narrow: watch real invited users on your vibe-coded app, get AI synthesis, own your data. Here's the honest breakdown — including what we don't do yet, and the case for the free tools over us.
| Capability | GhostView | Incumbents |
|---|---|---|
| Session replay | ✓ | ✓ |
| Click & event tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invite-gated real-user testing flow | ✓ | — |
| AI synthesis across sessions (built in) | ✓ | partial |
| Full raw JSON export — your data, no lock-in | ✓ | partial |
| Inputs masked by default | ✓ | partial |
| Heatmaps | — | ✓ |
| Funnels & retention dashboards | partial | ✓ |
| Large integration ecosystem | — | ✓ |
| Mature, battle-tested at scale | — | ✓ |
“Incumbents” is a rough composite of Hotjar, FullStory, LogRocket, and PostHog — capabilities vary by product and plan. If we got something wrong, tell us: rob@cartooli.com.
The one you were actually going to ask
Fair question, and we're not going to pretend the free tools don't exist. Microsoft Clarity is free forever and PostHog's free tier is genuinely generous. Neither of them is beatable on price, so we don't try.
| Capability | GhostView | Clarity | PostHog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price for a solo builder | partial | ✓ | ✓ |
| Session replay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Works with zero event taxonomy | ✓ | ✓ | partial |
| Cross-session AI synthesis, built in | ✓ | partial | partial |
| Invite-gated testing for unlaunched apps | ✓ | — | — |
| Structured findings for an agent to consume | ✓ | — | — |
| Heatmaps | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Feature flags, experiments, warehouse | — | — | ✓ |
| Self-hostable | — | — | ✓ |
It's free, it's good, and it's backed by Microsoft. What it hands you is recordings — one at a time, for you to watch. What it can't do is gate an app that isn't public yet behind invite links, which is the situation most pre-PMF builders are actually in.
It's a better and broader product than this one, with feature flags, experiments, and a warehouse attached. It also assumes you can name the events worth tracking — the assumption that breaks when an LLM generated your app and you couldn't name a component in it if asked.
Recording has been commoditised and we're not claiming otherwise. The thing nobody does is watch the forty-seven recordings they collected. GhostView reads all of them in one pass and returns the pattern — the thing that shows up in five sessions and not in the two that converted — with the sessions and events cited so you can go disagree with it. See the output.
When you should not pick GhostView
If that's you, the incumbents are the right call — and we'll happily say so. GhostView is for the pre-PMF builder who wants to watch a handful of real users struggle and get a straight answer about why, without a per-seat contract.
The real limits
These are the limits that exist in the product today — not upsell tiers we invented to nudge you toward a plan.
Hard cap per recording — enough for very long sessions. Protects your data and replay performance.
Sessions are kept for a year, or until you delete them — whichever comes first. Backups purged within 30 days.
During early access we're not metering usage. We onboard builders by hand and will talk to you before anything ever changes.
Free during early access — no credit card, no expiring trial, no feature gates. The prices that apply when metering turns on are already published on /pricing, so you can judge the tool at full price rather than at zero.
We'd rather tell you when we're the wrong tool than sell you a plan you'll churn out of. If watching real users on your app sounds useful, request access.
Request early access→Invite-only · free during early access · usually a same-day reply.