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I often read posts stating a great deal of discouragement for self developed analytic solutions. I've recently developed a home rolled solution for a product I

I often read posts stating a great deal of discouragement for self developed analytic solutions. I've recently developed a home rolled solution for a product I'll hopefully launch soon. There's no UI for my signals application, but it should give me raw access to all the GA metrics people typically look for (pages, referrers, user agents, etc). Storage could be pain point. Compute might also turn out to be, but if that ever becomes a problem, then I'll probably have much more to think about... What am I missing here?

JackWritesCode 6y ago
Opportunity cost. Hacker News has some of the best developers in the world reading it. $100-500 / hourly rates. Why would they spend their time building & maintaining something when they could pay $140 / year for a top tier, privacy-focused analytics product like Fathom, where both founders work full time on it? Then you have redundancy of data. How are they backing up historical data? Are they running with failovers? How will their analytics do in the event that they get a hug of death from Hacker News or Reddit? There are so many factors to consider. I don't think we should discourage people from rolling their own if they enjoy it. Heck, I've built things that existed. That's how we get better. I'm just sharing why a lot of developers won't roll their own.