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RePlaya

self-hosted browser session replay with live tailing

Details

External ID
48373482
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Relay
Website domain
github.com
Launched
June 2, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
50
Upvotes percentile
0.8476775956284153
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hi HN, I'm one of the founders of s2.dev. RePlaya (https://github.com/s2-streamstore/replaya) is a self-hosted browser session replay tool using rrweb (https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb).It occurred to me that a durable stream per session would be a much neater architectural foundation for much of what you'd want from such a tool. As a unique feature, it also made live tailing straightforward because the player can read from the same stream the recorder is appending to.The alternative architecture is likely an ingest firehose which is then indexed, with associated complexity and latency. You'd have to string together multiple data systems like a message queue, a metadata database, and blob storage and/or an OLAP database.Here the only dependency is S2, which has an open source version you can self-host called s2-lite (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708055).How it works:- one S2 stream per browser session- large rrweb events (like a full snapshot) get framed across multiple binary S2 records and reassembled on read- active sessions are tailed with an S2 read session, and bridged to the browser over SSE- session listing relies on stream names encoding reverse timestamps, as S2 returns a lexicographic order listing- relying on fencing tokens so a stopped session can't be written to again by a late recorder- retention and GC are handled via S2 stream config, so no background job neededCurious to hear from folks on the tool or the stream-per-session model!

Enrichment

Theme
file transfer and sharing tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Observability & eval
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
self-hosted browser session replay
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Wrapping rrweb for recording and playback in a basic UI is trivial, but real-time session replay with live tailing at scale requires specialized high-throughput streaming architecture.

What it would actually take: The system requires an rrweb client agent pushing continuous DOM mutation streams over WebSockets into a distributed, durable append-only streaming store (like Apache Kafka, Redpanda, or custom S2 streams), followed by real-time tailing consumers. The hard part is ensuring low-latency event fan-out, robust snapshot synchronization during mid-session joins, and handling massive inbound DOM event throughput without browser or server memory bloat. This requires distributed systems and streaming data infrastructure expertise.

Discussion

8 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: OpenReplay, Other widely-adopted session replay products

Concerns raised: Privacy and ethical implications of session replay, User awareness and consent for cursor/viewport tracking, Whether visitors should be informed about recording, Browsers shouldn't be app hosts unless user opts in

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 48 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #12 of 49 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 213 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.