ObsessionDB
We rebuilt ClickHouse infrastructure to cut our costs 50%
Details
- External ID
- 46731299
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- ObsessionDB
- Website domain
- obsessiondb.com
- Launched
- Jan. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 12
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5586297760210803
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, I'm Marc. I run Numia, a blockchain data company serving real-time APIs at near-petabyte scale. ObsessionDB is managed ClickHouse we built for ourselves that costs roughly 50% less than other managed options. Now we're launching it as a standalone service.We had the classic split: ClickHouse for real-time analytics APIs, BigQuery for data warehouse workloads. Data replicated between both, costs adding up. Managed ClickHouse worked but was too expensive to put our warehouse workload into. Self-hosted meant replica nodes doubling storage and waiting days to copy 25TB to new replicas.What we really needed was separated storage and compute. SharedMergeTree does this, but it's proprietary to ClickHouse Cloud. So we built our own version. Migrated everything in, both the real-time APIs and warehouse workloads. No more replicating between systems. Been running it in production across 5 projects.The main wins: compute scales without replication tax, separate endpoints for ingest/API/ad-hoc so they can't interfere, no ZooKeeper or replica management on your end.Honest tradeoffs: we're early, EU only right now. Small workloads on a single node with local NVMe will be faster, the separation adds a bit of latency. If you're running something small and static, a self-hosted node is probably simpler. Where this shines is large datasets and elastic workloads where you don't want to babysit infra.Check it out: https://obsessiondb.com, happy to go deep on architecture, merges, failover, whatever.
Enrichment
- Theme
- database infrastructure and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Data infrastructure
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- clickhouse cost optimization
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Managing distributed petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters at 50% lower cloud cost demands deep systems architecture, Kubernetes operator orchestration, kernel tuning, and distributed storage optimization.
What it would actually take: Building a managed ClickHouse service requires custom Kubernetes operators, high-performance NVMe caching layers on top of object storage (S3/GCS), and deep tuning of ClickHouse's merge-tree engines, Keeper/ZooKeeper consensus, and multi-tenant isolation. The hard problem is optimizing query execution while keeping cold storage read costs low and maintaining high availability across AZs. This requires a dedicated systems infrastructure team with deep distributed database and cloud hardware economics expertise.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 75 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #34 of 76 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 86 days after the earliest competitor.
- Managed Postgres with native ClickHouse integration · hn · 2026-01-22 · 45 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- WaveHouse · hn · 2026-08-20 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- 500k+ events/sec transformations for ClickHouse ingestion · hn · 2026-04-08 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- CloudClerk. We struggled with BigQuery finops, so we decided to fight · hn · 2026-01-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Chainstack Self-Hosted, hosting your own blockchain nodes made simple · hn · 2026-06-21 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- We built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVM · hn · 2026-04-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- The TypeScript Semantic Layer for ClickHouse · hn · 2026-06-27 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Self-host Reddit · hn · 2026-01-13 · 286 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a data infrastructure tool for Media & entertainment yet.