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Show HN: Counter – Simple and Free Web Analytics
- als0 6y agoGoatcounter is another great open source alternative https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com
- pi_el_59 6y agoI have little experience in web analytics, but I just tried it out and it was so much simpler to setup than Google analytics! Great design as well.
- kowlo 6y agoSeen many of these on HN recently - decision paralysis
- ihucos 6y agoThat's why with counter you can get started in like 10 seconds. And permanently delete your data via the GUI if you don't like it :-)
- Techonomicon 6y agoCan't speak for the OC, but I'd say decision paralysis for these sorts of utilities is more about "will I regret having used this after a year vs something else" and less about "can I dump this after trying it for a week". Competition is great, but people are people and want to know they're making a good longer term decision, which isn't always clear in the short term. This is just something you can't help with outside of provide information, especially since use cases and desires of users of these services change over time.
- dang 6y agoHave you considered applying to YC? Email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like some tips or feedback with that. (Same offer goes for anybody! Just please realize that I can't always reply quickly and sometimes take embarrassingly forever.)
- ihucos 6y agoWell, people that know me know that I am not arrogant but actually I'd like to counter (pun intended) that offer. My Co-Founder and me want to work one year full time on the project. Here is our mail: hey@counter.dev
- amnotelonmusk 6y agoHow does it compare to plausible? Using them atm
- ihucos 6y agoAt the first sight they really look quite similar. Counter does not use a relational database and is highly optimized to serve users for free. If you want more details and really dig into the data plausible could be a better fit. If you value a free product and don't need too much details or actually even value less data collection then I would say go with counter.
- Techonomicon 6y agoIf you're collecting data, you generally want a) as much as you can get and b) be able to make use of it any way you want. Yes users of a privacy centric analytics tool are opting into less information, though the inability to do more may be a large downside to counter (if it is the case that it has less data collection capabilities vs plausible at this time). You never know what data you will need later, better to collect however much you're able to in a fashion you can do anything you need to with it.
- dkarras 6y agoThis is for people that don't want to do that.
- rafaelturk 6y agoThis looks amazing. Kudos for the project. Extra points for using Redis as main DB.
- ihucos 6y agoThanks! That is really cool to hear.
- dorianmariefr 6y agoI use https://github.com/ankane/ahoy https://github.com/ankane/ahoy and quite happy with it
- calebclark 6y agoThe product looks awesome! I do have a question... If Counter is free, what is the revenue model? How will you sustain the platform? Although it's open source, it seems to be a SaaS platform that runs on your servers.
- ihucos 6y agoYes, so although it is optimized to be very cheap to operate many users there still are costs. We hope to get that via donations or as it's communicated in the website "Pay what you want". One single advertising banner is also something we are considering. So the amount we have to get from active users is really low. Currently there are 80 integrations with multiple sites on the cheapest linode VPS. The redis database is 2 megabytes on disk and the CPU does not go over 1% usage (before this HN post). If you just take our current integrations and divide them by the costs the VPS makes you get to pennies per user per month. I did not put in my calculation that not all integrations are active but you get the idea :-)
- YY-EN40P 6y agoYou can study fathom( https://usefathom.com/pricing https://usefathom.com/pricing ). As you say, the running cost of Counter is low, but your job is more valuable!
- ihucos 6y ago> [...] but your job is more valuable! Well, not if I spend my free time on open source projects :-D
- bobkrusty 6y agoplease accept ETH coins i have no credit cards ETH will be env friendly soon when its consensus algorithm switch to POS or make android app im willing to watch ads everyday btw, why your twitter account ge suspended
- rdm_blackhole 6y agoI moved from GA to Plausible a while back. Very nice product and easy to set up. Its a paid product but I would rather keep my user's data private. This product seems interesting but its free so I fail to see how you will keep maintaining it in the future if you don't get paid. I understand that running it will cost you a few dollars a month if that at the beginning but eventually, between the time spent on maintenance and the ongoing costs, you are going to have to start charging your customers.
- bumblewax 6y agoI swapped from GA to Plausible myself recently and am loving it. Just the feeling of knowing there's no trackers on your site is worth it tbh.
- slipper1 6y agoA tracker is a tracker. Doesn't matter if it is privacy friendly or not. If I can block it, you bet I will.
- bumblewax 6y agoI get this, and that's alright. The only reason I have tracking set up is to get an idea of how the site is doing. I should probably just record the events I need myself instead.
- ihucos 6y agoI am doing this together with my regular job. At the very moment it does cost me about the same as the Netflix account I am paying for my parents. The plan to be profitable is by mass. There was a lot of time and thought spend on making this service really really cheap to serve. Even now with this HN my redis database is two megabytes in size and before this HN post with happy and active users the CPU did not went over 1% usage - on a cheap VPS. So the bottom line is if we can get in only a small fraction of what other services have as a fee I am happy. I think we are talking about less than one cent per user per month. In any case I feel comfortable to get that with Pay as you want and one advertising banner. Don't get me wrong. It is a great product and we do expect users to actually pay for it if they are using it on a commercial project. We just have the luxury to ask for a payment instead of charging it. I also think plausible is a great product. If you are happy with it even better :-)
- imkieren 6y agoI wish more of these analytics platform had events. I want to see if my users are using features, button etc.
- slater 6y agoReminds me of the best analytics software I ever saw, ca. 1998, where it'd track each individual visitor's path through the site, e.g. - [12:00 - 89.212.12.whatever] - /index.php - [12:01 - 89.212.12.whatever] - /team/bob-smith/ - [12:02 - 89.212.12.whatever] - /products/turb-encab-9001/
- thestepafter 6y agoCheck out Posthog, they do event tracking very well.
- mNovak 6y agoThanks for the suggestion this looks great; and with a free tier for hobby sites like mine.
- galuggus 6y agoTry simple analytics
- tobiaslins 6y ago
- fish45 6y agoThis is exactly what I was looking for. I set it up on a site in hardly a minute.
- freitasm 6y agoDo we have to worry that their Twitter account is currently suspended - "Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules"? https://twitter.com/DevCounter https://twitter.com/DevCounter
- sokoloff 6y agoI don’t know. I have several Twitter accounts that are suspended for rules violations and they’ve tweeted and followed people zero times, so I don’t think you can necessarily read too much into that.
- IncRnd 6y agoIf you select just 23 Twitter users from a group, the probability will be >50% that at least two have had their accounts suspended or closed.
- dukeofharen 6y agoFun fact. Once I made a Twitter account for my open source project. Twitter says you can use the "date of birth" field for your actual date of birth or the launch date of your product. Once I entered 2 May 2018, I was suspended because now I'm too young :| I didn't want to go through the hassle of getting my account reinstated, because Twitter isn't that important to me.
- ihucos 6y agoThanks for writing. There was absolutely no activity done on that twitter account. In any case we swapped it to one that is actually active :-) https://twitter.com/NaiveTeamHQ https://twitter.com/NaiveTeamHQ
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- city41 6y agoCan someone versed in open source licenses chime in in what it means to use this service since it is licensed under the AGPL? I'm not an expert but as I understand it AGPL can require your own code to come under AGPL as well?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dkarras 6y agoNo, it should prevent someone else taking the code and starting a competing service with said code without opening its source. If it was GPL, you'd be forced to open your source if you distributed your software to others - it does not apply to a web service where the software is always ran in the owner's computer. So I could take your GPL code, build a service running on my server (without ever distributing the actual software) and not open my source. AGPL tries to fix that loophole. So if you are a user of this service, license has nothing to do with your own project, you are just a user of the service. But if you grab the source and create your own analytics (or something else) service from it then you have to open that source even if it runs on your own server(s).
- baddate 6y agoIt's an excellent project, I'll apply it for my site! by the way, is there any groups for communication?
- trungdq88 6y agoThe script from Counter is pretty special compare to others. It's a single fetch() call. And for some reasons, I can't see the request being logged to the Network tab in Chrome. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? My site: https://devutils.app/ https://devutils.app/
- amitheonlyone 6y agoYou have a typo in the line "You don't have to choose between free or privacy friendy." I believe you meant 'friendly'
- ihucos 6y agoYes, thank you! Fixed and deployed.
- InvOfSmallC 6y agoHey, just a suggestion: I would put a string and not the username/email in your javascript snippet to include in the html.
- murermader 6y agoI find it funny how the stats get skewed by developers or people coming from HN (83% from HN at the time of viewing). Windows, the most used OS in the world is listed under "Other" when looking at the Platforms pie chart. Pretty funny that in the HN community Linux is more commonly used than Windows, at least from the people that clicked on the link.
- lucideer 6y agoGiven Android is not listed, I suspect the Linux cohort may just be mostly mobile.
- pooper 6y agoDoes this count people with uBlock origin? I'm just one data point but here is my user agent: What is my user agent? Your User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:88.0) Gecko/88.0 Firefox/88.0 According to useragent v2.2.1: ua rawUa: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:88.0) Gecko/88.0 Firefox/88.0 string: family: Firefox Mobile major: 88 minor: 0 patch: 0 device: Generic Smartphone 0.0.0 os string: Android 0.0.0 family: Android major: 0 minor: 0 patch: 0 According to ua-parser-js v0.7.20: ua ua: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:88.0) Gecko/88.0 Firefox/88.0 browser name: Firefox version: 88.0 major: 88 engine name: Gecko version: 88.0 os name: Android version: 10 device vendor: undefined model: undefined type: mobile cpu architecture: undefined According to platform.js v1.3.5: ua name: Firefox Mobile version: 88.0 layout: Gecko os os: Android 10 device product: Mobile manufacturer: description: Firefox Mobile 88.0 on Mobile (Android 10)
- ihucos 6y agoYes, also before the HN peak it seemed that windows was not so common actually. Which kind of makes sense given the product.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoA question for this thread... Does not having Google Analytics on your site affect your google search site ranking in any way? I have Google Analytics on my sites and I'm concerned about losing vistors if I swap to some other trackers.
- lucideer 6y agoThere's no real way to know for sure (unless you work for Google), but if it did affect your ranking Google would be breaking antitrust law. They've gotten in trouble in courts for doing that with other products though so it's still potentially the case, legality aside.
- kaleidawave 6y agoWas looking for something like this the other day. Looks perfect! trying it out right now. Little confused how it works out the page though. Looking at the given snippet it doesn't seem to include anything and the pathname I am hitting is showing up on the dashboard as "/". Maybe missing sending "window.location.pathname"? And a super tiny thing but "navigator.sendBeacon" maybe better over "fetch". Other that super work!
- ihucos 6y agoOh by the way, we are looking for a Co-Founder that we are convinced is able to grow counter. We really don't care how, chould be content marketing. We are here for the long term. Write a couple of sentences to hey@counter.dev
- mikesabbagh 6y agoNice, I see u use cloudflare, is it the free version of cloudflare you use? or a paid version?
- ihucos 6y agoFree version. Not sure the server would survive Hacker News without it.
- abinaya_rl 6y agoI've been using Simple Analytics[1] for a while now and am loving it. Glad there is no trackers on the site. [1] - https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- rajatsx 6y agoI was not expecting it to work flawlessly with my open source LMS CourseLit which I am currently building as CourseLit still has rough edges. But it did! I was able to collect the analytics from my website and the setup was easier than that of Google Analytics. Great work.
- ihucos 6y ago:-)
- XCSme 6y ago> Web Analytics made simple and therefore privacy friendly One small remark: not storing personal data doesn't mean it's privacy friendly. Yes, it can be private for the user, but not for the business owner. If we still centralize data, then potentially a single entity gets information about traffic and browsing habits of user cohorts, which can then indeed be used for "evil", such as creating a competitor of that business by using the collected data or to guide those users towards a different website/direction.
- ecmascript 6y agoLooks nice but does the "pay what you want" model actually work? I just can see a lot of people not paying at all because people usually don't care enough.
- feistypharit 6y agoFrom GitHub: "We only track the first page the user views, this is again more privacy friendly and additionally also results in substantial less HTTP requests the server has to handle. As a result of this strategy, Counter is able to show top landing pages but not top pages" May not be big for some people, but that seems to be a very big consideration folks should be aware of.
- achairapart 6y agoWhat if someone programmatically hit: https://simple-web-analytics.com/track?referrer=spam.com&screen=0x0&user=counter&utcoffset=1 Your product looks great, by the way!
- ihucos 6y agoWell, I do have Dos protection so you'r traffic would get rejected at some point in time but it would make me unhappy because I'll have to fix up the data for demo or restore the backup for it. You'll have to do a little better than just that but generally speaking I can't 100% secure myself about the demo data being skewed. Other analytics may have a better position here because they do track and mess with the requester's IP address but I don't. [Writing in my lunch time]
- achairapart 6y agoObviously I won't do anything like that! Nevertheless, some bad actor may take advantage of the simplicity of the implementation (which is, at the same time, also a strong feature of your product). Of course this would affect every user, not just the demo account. I think this is one common issue with analytics products (Google Analytics itself has ridiculous amounts of spam referrers!). I guess may be a good idea to be proactive and plan some countermeasure at some point. Happy lunch!
- ihucos 6y agoFor every user you'd have to know all usernames which could be brute forced guessed or gathered with some sort of crawler. It's definitely a great point you bring up I think with web analytics an attacker has a natural advantage since captchas would obviously not be feasable. But it is worth to but effort in not making it too easy. > Happy lunch! Thanks :-) gonna start with my normal job now^^