The demo is not the product.

I used to judge a tool by its demo. If the walkthrough was clean and the dashboards were pretty, I trusted it.

So I pushed hard for self-hosted PostHog to capture events across our mobile and web apps. The demo was beautiful. Under our real load, with our data and our constraints, it came apart — built for side projects, not production. We ripped it out, having paid for the lesson in weeks of engineering time.

A demo shows you the happy path on someone else's data. Evaluate every tool under your real load, with your real constraints — or you're just buying the marketing.