# PostHog's Replay Vision sends your users' screens to Google

Canonical: https://flusterduck.com/blog/posthog-replay-vision-sends-your-screens-to-google
Published: 2026-08-06 · The Flusterduck team

PostHog's new AI feature watches your users' sessions and ships the video to Google to do it. Here's what it does well, what it doesn't, and what it actually costs.

PostHog's 'Replay Vision' sends your users' screens straight to Google. Worse yet, it doesn't generate much benefit.

For those who may not be aware, this is PostHog's fix for session replay. AI, specifically Google Gemini, watches your recordings, potentially including sensitive information about how your users interact with your site, to help you identify UX issues.

We're happy for them. We love competition, and we think they could have a great product. Here's what they got right, and where it falls apart.

## Wins

1. This is a well-planned product
2. They understand what it costs

## Deficiencies

1. It's invasive
2. It's shallow
3. It's expensive

Credit where it's due: this is a well-executed product. It was planned properly and tested for a real amount of time before shipping. Good work from the PostHog team.

They also understand the cost. PostHog usually runs a generous free tier, this time it doesn't, because they know what it costs to send hours of footage through an AI model. That's a smarter call than most companies make with a new AI feature, and it's why win #2 and deficiency #3 are the same fact told twice: they understand the cost because it's expensive, for them and for you.

Now the cons.

This product sends your users' screens to a Google server for processing. That's a second company holding the data now, not just PostHog, and a wider surface for something to go wrong.

It's also shallow. PostHog ships 2 hardcoded frustration signals, rage click and dead click, unchanged for years, plus 5 generic AI scanner templates: dead ends, session summary, user intent, frustration score, session outcome. Anything more specific than those five buckets, you write the prompt yourself. Flusterduck ships 131 named, weighted friction types automatically, zero config, out of the box. We don't wait for you to think of the failure mode first.

Selfish side note: we don't send anything to Google either. Detection happens in the browser, PII gets stripped before it ever leaves the visitor's machine, and nothing confidential touches our servers or anyone else's.

Lastly, it's expensive. PostHog gives Replay Vision a free tier of 2,500 credits, worth $25. After that, it's a cent a credit, and they don't publish what a single scan costs you in credits, so you can't do the math ahead of time. Compare that to Session Replay itself, 5,000 free recordings a month, no meter at all. The one feature that decides whether their AI catches anything is the one they didn't make generous.

If you're reconsidering your PostHog setup, you don't have to rip out the whole stack. Keep PostHog for what it's good at. For UX detection and fixes, we think we're just better at it.

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