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I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics, which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time to Beam Analytics now. I wou

I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics, which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time to Beam Analytics now. I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your success, other developers want to have it too. Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in the short term because of your ego.

ents 4y ago
Not possible to self host though.
- spapas82 4y ago
  Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license. You can even find instructions for self hosting here: https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.
  - huhtenberg 4y ago
    GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.
mtlynch 4y ago
There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention. I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here. If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.
- trulykp 4y ago
  Well said! I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.
rubenfiszel 4y ago
But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway. We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.
- ecuaflo 4y ago
  Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place https://starter.place?
paulgb 4y ago
Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white labeled instance of Plausible’s OSS?
- chronicom 4y ago
  It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on Twitter if you are interested in following their journey (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird, Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix. A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
  - zX41ZdbW 4y ago
    Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.
    - chronicom 4y ago
      Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't have to worry about.
- flurly 4y ago
  Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
jacooper 4y ago
Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently breaking the AGPL license. But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?
capableweb 4y ago
One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a sub-section of the users of Plausible.

ents 4y ago

Not possible to self host though.

spapas82 4y ago
Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license. You can even find instructions for self hosting here: https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.

mtlynch 4y ago

There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention. I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here. If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.

trulykp 4y ago
Well said! I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.

rubenfiszel 4y ago

But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway. We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.

ecuaflo 4y ago
Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place https://starter.place?

paulgb 4y ago

Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white labeled instance of Plausible’s OSS?

chronicom 4y ago
It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on Twitter if you are interested in following their journey (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird, Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix. A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
- zX41ZdbW 4y ago
  Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.
  - chronicom 4y ago
    Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't have to worry about.
flurly 4y ago
Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam

jacooper 4y ago

Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently breaking the AGPL license. But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?

capableweb 4y ago

One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a sub-section of the users of Plausible.