Show HN: ObsessionDB – We rebuilt ClickHouse infrastructure to cut our costs 50%
keks0r Friday, January 23, 2026
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.