5 ms·
Make your website a black hole to big tech
- alanfranz 7y agoThis is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year). Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?
- Celeo 7y agoThese collections propose a handful of alternatives: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#analytics https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ana... https://nomoregoogle.com/ https://nomoregoogle.com/
- pragmar 7y agoBeen using self-hosted Matomo (formerly piwik) for about 6 months. It does everything I need, but mileage will vary by use case. In terms of a feature matrix, it's significantly less powerful than GA.
- daveslash 7y agoFor my personal site, I use the free tier of StatCounter.com -- have been for over a decade now. Their site doesn't do a good job of advertising that they have a free tier, but it does exist.
- ioddly 7y agoFathom has a self hosted open source version which I found to be fine. I checked recently and it looks like commits have slowed down so I'm not sure if it's maintained.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoHere: https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemma https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemm... :)
- ihsoj 7y agoAgree - not an option for everyone. Free version for personal websites or websites with <x> visits/month would be great.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoLite - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
- ihsoj 7y agoLite - "Scaling requires you to power down and then upgrade your server" - what? Why don't give full version free for sites with low x visitors/month. One can easily upgrade if they see enough value. 2 cents.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoThat line needs updating as it doesn't apply to people running it serverless. That was aimed at the DO users who need to power down to upgrade. And we're not in a position to offer a free plan but may do in the future.
- sdan 7y agoI'm building one that's both cheaper (mostly free but at most $2 a month) and faster than Fathom. I'm onboarding some customers but I'm planning to launch in January! http://sdan.io/pingpong http://sdan.io/pingpong If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoGood luck. Building a sustainable business at $2 / month will be hard but we wish you the best :)
- sdan 7y agoGiven that I'm targeting the developer community, I understand that paying for stuff like this is a huge turn off (at least that's one of the main reasons I'm building this). In the long term I think I'll try making this more sustainable by selling to businesses (which in my mind and from what I heard makes more sense). Anyways, thanks!
- saagarjha 7y agoYour CSS might be missing some margins, just FYI.
- sdan 7y agoIt definitely is. I hacked it together a couple nights ago and left the mess there. Working on the backend to make it faster and reliable and I'll fix up the frontend.
- sj4nz 7y agoI've installed fathom and self-hosted it. Seems to work pretty well.
- coldpie 7y agoI also have a personal website and I just... don't put any analytics on it. Genuinely curious: what do you get out of having analytics on a personal site?
- dinkleberg 7y agoAnalytics is useful to understand what content you write people are consuming. If you write a bunch of blog posts that get no traffic but a few articles that get a lot of traffic, you can begin to understand what content others are finding helpful.
- rpdillon 7y agoI see surprisingly little discussion of web server log analysis. Would that suit your use case while avoiding client-side analytics?
- curlyPubes 7y agoSo... "big tech" is bad because spying on users is scummy behavior, but please do pay us to help you spy on your users. Also, we'll provide you with tools to spy on your users, but it's software as a service and everything important happens on our servers, where we get to keep all the logs we show you, of the events that we capture from your website. So, yes, we'll be intercepting that data, and we'll know things the same way other companies do, by being a fly on the wall, but it's totally cool. We're on your side. Trust us. We're different.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoOh crikey. Appreciate the criticism and totally appreciate if you don't trust us. You should not use Fathom and should consider going with our Lite version which you can self-host. We'll be making more changes to that version in the new year. With regards to data collection, check out: https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization If you're feeling this way already, we'll likely never earn your trust, and that's fine. We appreciate you voicing your concerns, as you obviously care about privacy. Have a great rest of day.
- thinkxl 7y agoIt is not about spying on users, but see trends and how users behave on your site. In my case, I want to see what posts have more visits. I don't intend to monetize my blog, but I do have a lot of curiosity about what people like to read on it.
- hmhrex 7y agoI've been using Fathom for about a little over a month now and I love it. I researched the privacy-focused analytics products out there and it came out on top: https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focused-analytics-platforms-209m https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoIf I don't use Google Analytics on my website, but 70% of my visitors visit using Chrome, Google knows what's going on regardless.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoScary thoughts. More people are moving to Brave, which is great.
- homosexual 7y agoIt's funny, because Brendan Eich catches a lot of flack for having donated money to oppose gay marriage, but the name "Brave" is one that can only attract a user population comprised solely of total homosexuals. Like, as in being "Brave" enough to come out of the closet and live a life as an openly gay male, like Kevin Spacey. Based on this, you can expect, and it is my prediction, that Brave will only ever appeal to roughly one tenth the population, with another tenth curious and experimenting, but never fully adopting a "Brave" lifestyle.
- pauljarvis 7y agoNah, #Firefox4life ;)
- JackWritesCode 7y agoHell yah to that too!
- thinkxl 7y agoI've been using Firefox and DuckDuckGo for almost four years now!
- poops 7y agoGoogle knows what's going on w/ 70% of your visitors, as opposed to 100%
- colechristensen 7y agoIs there any analytics kind of product that just pulls information from web server access logs? There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)
- sdan 7y agoCheck out Logflare. In either case, I'm building a cheaper and faster version of Fathom (http://sdan.io/pingpong http://sdan.io/pingpong). Currently I'm onboarding some customers. I'll try to see if I can incorporate web access logs as well. If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
- jchw 7y agoFunny enough, Urchin was exactly this.
- jobigoud 7y agoIt still is. My personnal websites are on shared hosting at OVH. I get all the analytics I need from Urchin, free of charge, no client side js.
- senko 7y agoGoAccess (https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/) looks interesting, though I haven't had the chance to play with it yet.
- diafygi 7y agoGoAccess doesn't seem to have conversion funnel tracking. Or is available in some sub-feature or plugin?
- thinkxl 7y agoRelated "Show HN: I replaced Google Analytics with simple log-based analytics"[1] - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- martokus 7y agoI don't get this. Small personal website are not going to pay money. Business websites in general will not leave GA and not because of the analytical aspect but because of the integrations. Businesses use Google Ads, GA ties in closely with Ads. Then you connect to Data Studio for your dashboards. And deploy through GTM. It's a whole eco system that's hard to replace by a single piece of software. As much as I'd love to stick it to Google as a person responsible for a business site I can't afford it.
- pauljarvis 7y agoNot all businesses use ads or data studio though. Those folks are looking for quick and easy stats they can use to run their business, like what content is popular, what referrals are driving traffic. And, if they're a business, they are making money, and at least some can afford to pay for expenses like website analytics. Like all software, it's not for everyone in every situation, but it is for certain folks in certain situations.
- Hoasi 7y agoI have not used Google Analytics in years. There are so many extraordinary features that I ended up wasting too much time with it without any substantial gain. Now you'd have to pay me to use it. For small sites, it is overkill.
- sdan 7y agoIt definitely is. As someone who just made some simple HTML sites on Github Pages, I just want some simple analytics without having to pay much. That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January. It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple. If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
- thinkxl 7y ago> it is overkill. > It definitely is. It is not, you pay $14 and you get basic analytics and this https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization that's worth the money for me. > It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple. What about user privacy? are you anonymizing the users?
- sdan 7y agoAs a student (and a developer) I see paying $14 a month a huge expense. To really promote the privacy and accessibility for all, I'm building this to make it free and will absorb the compute costs if I have to for the sake of value for customers. Finally, yes, I'm planning to utilize a variety of shuffling and hashing techniques to anonymize users, data, and all other aspects. At the moment, I'm focusing on getting under 90ms on average globally (which I have achieved, just not implemented into the master branch yet)... which is over 4.5x faster than Fathom's average of 420ms globally. More coming soon! Fill out if interested: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8.
- 7y ago
- saadalem 7y agoYou should have a more killer product than google analytics to have people pay for it ! People don't care about privacy at the point they talk ;)
- thinkxl 7y agoA "killer" product isn't for everybody. Not everyone needs all the options that Google Analytics offer, plus there are some people concerned about privacy, and products like Fathom and Simple Analytics are perfect for them.
- sveingjoby 7y agoI can't imagine to pay $14/m for my personal website
- thinkxl 7y agoI do and I'm pretty happy with it. https://app.usefathom.com/share/hwimpavv/jolvera.dev https://app.usefathom.com/share/hwimpavv/jolvera.dev
- sdan 7y agoI can't either. As someone who just wants simple, private, and cheap analytics, I wanted a product that could do so (all current products are pretty expensive). That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January. It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple. If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
- nesyt 7y agoThis is just an advertisement for the company. It doesn't really say anything substantive. "Google bad, we better!"
- JackWritesCode 7y agoIt's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products. We're as surprised as you that this ended up on the front page.
- FisDugthop 7y agoBut you submitted it. You ought to know that submitting an article can cause it to appear on the front page. You also ought to know better than to submit advertisements, yet you did it anyway.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoIt's got an upsell in it but it's not an advert.
- snickerbockers 7y ago>It's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products. Their pitch is "we respect your privacy more than the other guy" instead of just "we respect your privacy". User privacy is the antithesis of what they do.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoI'd say it's both, snickerbockers. Google Analytics wasn't built with privacy in mind and Google is in the advertising business primarily.
- ibudiallo 7y agoMost people I know with small websites will not pay $15/month for analytics. The privacy part of it is also not really the concern of small website owners. This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik). I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog. If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize it for you.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoWe have a Lite version too if $14 is too much: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
- itake 7y ago$14 is too much.
- thinkxl 7y agoNot too much at all. But in case your budget is tight, you can move around some services, for example, I canceled my hosting account and moved all my websites to ZEIT Now, and I pay around ~11 USD for 7 sites and 20 API endpoints (serverless functions). I have two sites in my Fathom Analytics account which I pay $14 USD/month. Keep in mind that you can add multiple sites to your Fathom account, you just need to keep an eye on the page views.
- joshmanders 7y agoDisclaimer: I’m a fathom user. $14/mo is not too much for me knowing my services and websites aren’t another point of interest in googles data mining and selling scheme.
- 7y ago
- DrOctagon 7y agoHappy (recent) Fathom customer. I use it on a handful of small side projects. I hope there is space in the market for a product like this. I did a reasonable amount of research and the $14/month is worth it for the handful of side projects I use it on. Their marketing can be a little earnest, but for me the product strikes the right balance between the info provided, privacy, and cost.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoAppreciate the honest review :)
- notacoward 7y agoThe title is misleading. This isn't about Big Tech. It's about Google specifically. Why not name them?
- JackWritesCode 7y agoIt applies to big tech. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches etc.
- notacoward 7y agoYes, those things happened, but they're not relevant to this advertorial which is very clearly about Google Analytics. Facebook doesn't run Google Analytics. Yahoo doesn't run Google Analytics. Google does. It's just oh-so-convenient how people always name-and-shame every other company, but when Google is the culprit it's "big tech" in general.
- JackWritesCode 7y agoFair enough, point taken. We could've named Google in the title.
- pteredactyl 7y agoPiwik.
- lance76 7y agoI still don’t understand why small website owners don’t just use their server logs. They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being inactive. The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular but the rest seem similar. Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so you lose cool 5-year growth stats. I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else. Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.
- xp84 7y agoFathom "Doesn't use cookies" - so how does it have any concept of things like sessions and unique users then? I really want to know. The website doesn't explain this, it just drops that line and walks away. This is like saying a car "doesn't need tires" - sounds interesting, but wtf does that mean? I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.' I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks - though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS. Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern. (of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil and scary).