I Built an Open-Source Firebase Analytics Alternative Because I Hit 1M Events/Day Once Too Many (opens in new tab)

A few years ago I was the data engineer on a mobile game soft launch when Firebase Analytics quietly started dropping events past its 1M/day cap. We didn't catch it for days. That experience pushed me to build Rawbbit — an open-source, Apache 2.0, self-hosted analytics pipeline that lands raw events as Parquet in your own object storage. This is the story of why hosted analytics fails at scale, why I chose NATS + Parquet + BigQuery external tables, and what I deliberately left out.