RedTrack vs Keitaro: the $3k lesson on hosted vs self-hosted trackers
The setup: Push campaign on nutra, 4 GEOs, ~80k clicks/day at peak. We ran RedTrack (hosted) for the first month, then ported to self-hosted Keitaro on a $40 VPS.
The move: RedTrack billed by events. At 80k clicks plus postbacks plus impression tracking we hit ~$1,290/mo. Keitaro was a one-time $50/mo license on hardware we already paid for.
The numbers (illustrative): Tracker cost dropped from ~$1,290 to ~$90/mo all-in. But self-hosting cost us two redirect outages during a traffic spike — the VPS ran out of RAM, and we lost ~6 hours of conversions, maybe $400 in untracked revenue we couldn't reconcile.
The lesson: Hosted trackers are insurance you pay monthly. Below ~30k clicks/day, RedTrack's reliability is cheaper than your time. Above that, the event pricing punishes you and self-hosting pays for itself in weeks — IF you can babysit the box.
What I'd do differently: Start hosted to validate, then move to Keitaro only once daily volume is stable and you've load-tested redirects to 2x peak. We migrated mid-scale and ate the outages. Migrate during a quiet GEO, not your money one.
Arb Files
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