PostHog prices its forward deployed engineering by milestone, not by the hour, with a $5K minimum

PostHog now sells hands-on help from its forward deployed engineers as a paid service, and its public services page and handbook spell out how that work is priced. Engagements are quoted per milestone deliverable rather than per hour, with a $5,000 minimum. Discovery and scoping are free, customers get a quote within a day or two of the scoping call, and a deliverable that doubles in scope gets a new quote instead of being quietly extended. For migrations off tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel, PostHog says it will also buy out the rest of the customer's old contract where it makes sense.

An FDE Times analysis published on 10 October notes that the $5,000 floor replaced an earlier line on the services page that tied the FDE fee to roughly 20% of the credits a customer bought in its first year. PostHog's handbook doesn't give a reason for the change, but it does say an FDE's value now lies more in judgment than in volume of output, since AI makes producing code cheap.

The handbook also defines "done" tightly: a milestone counts only once the deliverable has shipped and a named person on the customer side has approved it, and anything reusable should be turned into an example, template or product improvement.

For FDEs, this is a concrete model for turning judgment into something a customer can sign for. It's also a useful set of interview questions for any FDE role: how the team handles scope growth, who signs off on the customer side, and what happens to the work after the engagement ends.