I want to share my experience with the new Tinybird analytics integration in Ghost 6. The idea behind this feature is very good. You can see analytics directly inside the Ghost dashboard without leaving the platform. In theory this should improve workflow and give faster access to data. In practice the situation is very different, especially on the Tinybird Free Plan.
The Free Plan is not usable for any real production site. You cannot use it even for a small blog with a few members. I spent a lot of time configuring Tinybird for Ghost. Because Ghost and Tinybird are official partners I expected the setup to be simple. My expectation was to see a predefined schema ready for Ghost, where the user only needs to create a Tinybird account and paste a token. Instead, you must deploy data sources through the Tinybird CLI. For many people this is a major problem.
The main issue is the 1,000 requests per day limit. At first 1,000 requests may look like a lot. In real usage they disappear in a few hours. If you open the Ghost dashboard and view the analytics multiple times you will burn through the limit very fast. I tested three different Ghost 6 installations and three Tinybird configurations in Docker. Every single time the 1,000 requests were consumed almost instantly.
What is even stranger is what happened after I deleted everything. I removed the Docker images, I deleted the test VPS, everything was gone. Even after that Tinybird continued to receive requests. I kept their dashboard page open in my browser and within half a day the counter reached 374 out of 1,000 requests. This means I was billed for requests without an active Ghost project, only by having their dashboard open.
The service is also expensive. The value you get does not come close to simpler and cheaper alternatives like Rabbit. The configuration process is not easy and the cost is high. From my point of view the integration is limited compared to other solutions. The only good part is the ability to see analytics directly in the Ghost dashboard. The problem is that this comes with a high cost.
I ask the Ghost team or Tinybird team to explain how these requests are calculated. I want to know if every page reload counts as one request or if the amount of data read is the factor. This information changes everything. A clear explanation is needed because at the moment the real behavior is confusing.
If anyone has deeper technical details about how Tinybird counts requests in this Ghost integration, please explain it here.
