Thanks, this post was insightful. I laughed at the reason why you rejected Arize Phoenix, I had similar thoughts while going through their site!=)
> "Another notable feature of Langfuse is the use of a model as a judge ... this is not enabled in the free version/self-hosted version"
I think you can add LLM-as-judge to the self-hosted version of Langfuse by defining your own evaluation pipeline: https://langfuse.com/docs/scores/external-evaluation-pipelin...