Feature Request: add historical count

Feature request

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Customers want to analyze non-linear user journeys where users may retry steps multiple times. Currently there's no way to segment or filter users based on how many times they've historically performed an event, making it difficult to understand retry behavior and measure feature adoption for flows that aren't strictly linear.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add an "event historical count" property (similar to Amplitude's implementation) that tracks how many times each user has performed a specific event.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• use lifecycle analysis to show user status, but doesn't provide granular count of event occurrences,
• use retention analysis to track return behaviour over time periods but not cumulative event counts
• use hogql query to calculate historical counts manually but requires SQL knowledge and doesn't integrate with the standard insight filters/breakdowns

Additional context

From: https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/47767 (moved to PostHog: https://us.posthog.com/project/2/support/tickets/52866)

Debug info

Kind: support

Target area: session_replay

Report event: http://go/ticketByUUID/694b08aa-d646-4a33-a843-63569c977dc8

Session: https://us.posthog.com/project/sTMFPsFhdP1Ssg/replay/019bdfad-d198-7ee9-a2ab-917c64a12653?t=2206

Exceptions: https://us.posthog.com/project/2/error_tracking?filterGroup=%7B%22type%22%3A%22AND%22%2C%22values%22%3A%5B%7B%22type%22%3A%22AND%22%2C%22values%22%3A%5B%7B%22key%22%3A%22%24session_id%22%2C%22value%22%3A%5B%22019bdfad-d198-7ee9-a2ab-917c64a12653%22%5D%2C%22operator%22%3A%22exact%22%2C%22type%22%3A%22event%22%7D%5D%7D%5D%7D

Location: https://eu.posthog.com/project/37407/toolbar

Persons-on-events mode for project: person_id_override_properties_on_events

Start with the linked Amplitude historical-count documentation and the existing insight filters, breakdowns, lifecycle analysis, and retention analysis described in the issue. The work is done when users can segment or filter by the cumulative number of times they performed a specific event; no repository files or tests are named.