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Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

283 points by gernest 2y ago

For the past 3 years I have been working on a Golang port of plausible analytics dashboard. vince is a single binary, single user with multiple website system with zero runtime dependency. Key featues: - Automatic TLS - Outbounds link tracking - File downloads tracking - 404 pages tracking - Custom event tracking And so much more, basically everything that you see on plausible dashboard except funnels and custom properties. You can use vince as a drop in replacement for plausible for personal websites. The goal is to make the plausible dashboard easily accessible for people who like to self host. All features not related to the dashboard are non goal, hence not implemented. Full dashboard demo hosted on 6$ vultr instance https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?auth=Ls9tV4pzqOn7BJ7-&demo=true https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/...

cebert 2y ago
If you haven’t checked it out yet, Serverless Website Analytics, is a great solution for this too. It’s easy to deploy and very inexpensive to run. I’ve been using it and am quite happy with it. https://github.com/rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics https://github.com/rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics
- gernest 2y ago
  Interesting, I just checked the readme. Very similar but looks like it only works with AWS and has a lot of moving pieces. How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions. Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases. With vince, I had to index embed the whole city data from geonames database to work around this.
  - alam2000 2y ago
    [dead]
  - reincoder 2y ago
    > How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions. > Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases. I work for IPinfo. I think you might find my conversation with Goatcounter's dev interesting: https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/765 https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/765 I pitched him to use our free country database because of MaxMind's EULA issues. MaxMind does not permit distribution of the database and requires end users to use their own token. Moreover, they actually charge thousands of dollars when you distribute the "free" database with a commercial intent. Now, we have a free IP to Country database that we offer under a straight CC-BY-SA 4.0 license without an EULA. It is free, comes with daily updates, has full accuracy, and you can even commercially redistribute the database (via providing us an attribution). I understand we do not have a free city database to offer, nor is our database lightweight because we have full accuracy. But you can check it out if you are interested. We do have a version with ASN (ISP) information as well.
8ig8 2y ago
Matomo is another one… https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
rgbrgb 2y ago
> Full dashboard demo hosted on 6$ vultr instance https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/ https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/... 404 page not found
- thangngoc89 2y ago
  I found a link from github https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?auth=Ls9tV4pzqOn7BJ7-&demo=true https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?...
  - XCSme 2y ago
    That looks exactly like Plausible
    - thangngoc89 2y ago
      I believe it's the same frontend code as Plausible. They replaced the backend with golang (instead of Nodejs)
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
Looks interesting. What sort of memory requirements does it have and how does it persist data?
- gernest 2y ago
  The demo, which survived HN hug of death is running on 6$ vultr instance. RAM : 1GB STORAGE: 25 GB so far bandwidth used is 3.6GB So, you can successful deploy vince on low spec servers depending on your expected traffic.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
colesantiago 2y ago
Great project keep it up it's good to see competition in this space. Plausible gets crazy expensive on their hosted option and it complex to setup (needs elixir + high memory requirements) If Vince gets 1:1 parity with plausible and has the option to use clickhouse, I'll consider moving a few servers and people I know over. Love that Vince is also a single binary as well.
just-tom 2y ago
The screenshot on your homepage looks very similar to plausible's https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ which is also open-source analytics software. Is it based on it? What are the differences? Edit: Just noticed the feature comparison in the readme.
- dewey 2y ago
  Also Plausible is almost stock TailwindUI elements + including the default color, so many sites look like that.
brokegrammer 2y ago
This is amazing! I self host Plausible but don't like depending on Clickhouse and Postgres because they're annoying to upgrade. What kind of database is this using though? I don't know enough Go to figure it out from the source.
- tricked 2y ago
  I checked the go.mod and it seems to be importing a module named pebble by cockroachdb i assume that's where everything is stored https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble
- akshayshah 2y ago
  It uses Pebble, the key-value store that backs CockroachDB.
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    Just saw this notice: > WARNING: Pebble may silently corrupt data or behave incorrectly if used with a RocksDB database that uses a feature Pebble doesn't support. Caveat emptor! Slightly worrying for now running this in prod if there is a risk for silent data corruption, but hopefully in a few years Vince would have drivers for Postgres / Clickhouse.
    - rickette 2y ago
      This just warns about using Pebble with an existing RocksDB which isn't the case here. Pebble powers CockroachDB which is a Serious Database.
      - kamikazechaser 2y ago
        And Ethereum's state store. Which is an even more serious "database".
    - dangoodmanUT 2y ago
      Reread the sentence, it says if you mix it with RocksDB (another database that has compatible file formats)
t0mas88 2y ago
It says GDPR compliant and no cookies on the project page. How are unique visitors calculated? And I'm assuming it can't link conversions to campaigns without some cookie-alternative?
- withinboredom 2y ago
  No idea, but generally, a bloom filter would get you there without any identifying information being stored. The counts would merely be estimates at that point, not exact values.
- pdyc 2y ago
  most likely through one way ip hashing bounded by time duration. If you have utm's in your url than it can track otherwise probably not.
- beeb 2y ago
  At least for Plausible, they state this (https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies): > Instead of tagging users with cookies, we count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website. Counting IP addresses is an old-school method that was used before the modern age of JavaScript snippets and tracking cookies. Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day. Old salts are deleted to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.
  - chrismorgan 2y ago
    > Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. Um... hashing IPv4 addresses, even with salt, does literally nothing to anonymise (assuming the output space is at least ~32 bits, which I think is safe to assume): they’ll still be PII. IPv6 addresses I’m not so confident about; maybe it would be sufficient for some parts, but it’s definitely inadequate for some concerns. (For IPv4, enumerating all four billion inputs is so completely practical that “one-way” is nonsense.) I’m almost certain this is legal theatre.
drchaim 2y ago
this is great, congrats!
lovegrenoble 2y ago
Is is a Plausible clone? https://plausible.io https://plausible.io
- __jonas 2y ago
  From the Readme: > vince started as a Go port of plausible with a focus on self hosting.
samdung 2y ago
This is great. I'm def going to use it. Minor bug: "See Live Demo Dashboard" url is wrongly pointed.
pdyc 2y ago
Looks exactly like plausible, may be change the ui a bit to avoid legal issues.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  I was going to say that it looks exactly like BeamAnalytics, and now I'm confused to who's copying who...
  - dewey 2y ago
    Because everyone is using: https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing
    - huhtenberg 2y ago
      It's not just the looks that are the same. The UX / mechanics are way too similar too, e.g. how you can apply filters (by URL, by referrer, by browser, etc.) to narrow down the stats view.
      - rkuodys 2y ago
        I would say pretty much the idea is as follow: "Let's do it so User would know how to use it before we are big", and once you're big enough - you can set the trend. But at the beginning it's just not worth it and highly risky
  - serial_dev 2y ago
    I'm wondering when copying becomes just following industry best practices... Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky all look the same. Project management apps all reuse the same UI patterns. The "AI" logo looked pretty much the same for all companies for a while. Video sharing websites all use YouTube's layout. Forums like Reddit and HN share quite a lot in their looks. If you want to display website analytics, you will want to show the most important metrics at a glance, you'll need graphs showing visitors over time, top sources and pages... There is only so much you can do to display those and have users understand what's going on on your website.
notRobot 2y ago
The dashboard demo isn't working :(
zoidb 2y ago
My go-to self hosted GA alternative is goatcounter https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com. It would be interesting to know what advantages it has over it.
- james-bcn 2y ago
  Oh I like that main dashboard. Very simple.
  - TravisPeacock 2y ago
    If you like that there is https://www.piratepx.com/ https://www.piratepx.com/ which is even more minimal (though less data), I also built something even MORE minimal (only API calls) https://github.com/teamcoltra/ninjapx https://github.com/teamcoltra/ninjapx but I'm certainly not recommending it. It is super simplistic (also the readme is embarrassing)
- sandeepthroat 2y ago
  [dead]
- huhtenberg 2y ago
  Does it allow filtering visited page list by a specific referrer and vice verse?
  - zoidb 2y ago
    Yes, it does if I understand what you mean. You can see the traffic distribution (what paths were accessed) broken down by referrer.
cpursley 2y ago
How would y’all go about building analytics into a professional marketplace type of app where you can provide the professional with their own profile page stats (in a reliable way)?
Oras 2y ago
If you don't have plans to offer saas, what are you trying to achieve from it? I mean, it is quite nice to have binary installation hosted on a single VPS, but will you support it?
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  FOSS lives!
rasso 2y ago
Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server? If so, it might really be „for everyone“. Otherwise, we are stuck with matomo.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server? Since they usually offer software via cPanel and alike, seems unlikely unless you give it lots of time for the project to first get popular enough to get on the "admin panels" mind, and secondly for them to integrate it. Besides, do people really pay 10 USD/month for shared hosting? Sounds really expensive when you can grab VPSes for half that price and run whatever software you want, not just what they've packaged for you. I guess ongoing maintainace is included in that price, but still sounds kind of expensive for what you get.
  - rasso 2y ago
    I don‘t know… around here (Germany), that‘s pretty common. No need to manage anything, no usage-based cost, … my favourite is https://all-inkl.com https://all-inkl.com. OG no-bs hosting for boring tech.
manishsharan 2y ago
I think the reason some of us continue using Google Analytics is its demographic data. That information is not available elsewhere as far as I know , which I admit is not a lot.
paradite 2y ago
Not sure why I would use this over Plausible CE on docker. Does it consume less memory/CPU? Also I am pretty sure Plausible CE doesn't limit number of sites / events, unlike what's listed in "Comparison with Plausible Analytics".
- deleted 2y ago
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written-beyond 2y ago
Code quality is pristine, really great job! I see that you've used protocol buffers, can you expand on why? I am aware of the benefits it offers but I think it adds a bit of mental overhead initially due to it being an additional type system you have to understand. Also why are you using pebble exactly? I was interested in seeing how you're managing your geo databases because that's usually the most mind numbing part of handling analytics if your cloud provider doesn't add that information into the request header already. However, I can't understand why you'd use pebble over something like sqlite.
- gernest 2y ago
  Thanks, > Why protocol buffers ? They are very good for defining API boundaries, in vince we only use them for configuration and admin structure. We use Roaring Bitmap based storage, so fundamental units persisted are Bitmap containers. > Also why are you using pebble exactly? Well, vince is write heavy and any LSM based key value store would have been nice. It happens pebble is the best option for us. Also, we don't use transactions (We batch writes and use snapshots for reads). Combining with the fact we rely on pebble batch Merge api. The merge api allows us to do efficient updates. Since we only store bitmap containers, when doing update we just do a container union of observed values of a key. Bitmap unions are pretty fast and efficient. I hope I covered all your questions.
  - written-beyond 2y ago
    It answered them alright, but really opened a few hundred more. I appreciate your time!
skeptrune 2y ago
Cool that there are so many of these now. Currently self hosting plausible and it does seem quite barebones. Will have to give this a shot!
gonafr 2y ago
How this compares to umami (https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/)?
- arcastroe 2y ago
  I'm also interested in this. They seem to have very similar UI
vextea 2y ago
There seems to be some mentions of selling licenses (and pricing) in the source. What are the plans around that? https://github.com/vinceanalytics/vince/blob/f0c2c3cc38cbd8c6263993163e102dd339d2f44d/internal/web/templates/stats/site_locked.html#L19 https://github.com/vinceanalytics/vince/blob/f0c2c3cc38cbd8c...
- gernest 2y ago
  When I started working on vince, I thought I could bootstrap a sustainable business, that was about 3 years ago. My dream for a business is practically dead now. That snippet is a relic of early days of vince and I will remove it. I am currently looking for work, and will be maintaining vince as usual (I do a lot of open source stuff) since I also use it with my hobby projects. I'm struggling finding remote roles now, since remote now means Remote US or Remote EU and I'm stuck here in Tanzania. So, don't worry, I also use vince so I will keep hacking on it.
  - vextea 2y ago
    Makes sense, wish you the best of luck!
sira04 2y ago
Looks great! I found a small bug, if you click Expand in the Top Pages section, the Time on Page column has NaNs. Dark mode for the dashboard and showing realtime current visitors in the <title> would be great.
cchance 2y ago
"see live dashboard" button on main page just... goes to the top of the page lol
slyall 2y ago
Going through the docs I find you don't actually have a bit about how to make your website to use it. I mean I can work it would and it'll be obvious to proper front end developers but at not point do you say: "Add the following line to you page source to send data to Vince"
lomkju 2y ago
Nice Work! Very easy to install and use. I deployed this on our cloud (excloud.in) in less than 2 mins. Anyone you can use the below k8s manifest to deploy it to their k8s cluster. Just change the admin password before doing so. https://gist.github.com/lomkju/90fe7500d8cf854bf3b7c2f26aa580e0 https://gist.github.com/lomkju/90fe7500d8cf854bf3b7c2f26aa58...
- gernest 2y ago
  Thanks, that is very nice setup. Does it always pull the latest vince image? Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts https://vinceanalytics.com/charts
  - lomkju 2y ago
    > Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts https://vinceanalytics.com/charts Oh cool, didn't see that in the docs. > Does it always pull the latest vince image? Yes haven't specified any tag so should default to latest.
kukkeliskuu 2y ago
This is great. For me the commercial Plausible is just not plausible. I have a site with 2M page views, with most of the pages cached, which keeps the server costs minimal, I pay around 50 USD per month. I don't get much revenue from the site. I want to show visit counts on the site. For 2M page views, Plausible (with the stats API) would cost 189 USD per month, quadrupling my costs.
- gernest 2y ago
  This is one of the reason I created vince. For reference, the demo is hosted on a 6$ vultr instance, the last 3 days it handled about 11.9K pageviws with 4.3K unique visitors. I have just checked the vultr dashboard. Bandwidth = 3.37 GB ,vCPU usage = 1% (yep one percent) , Current charges = 1.06$. Majority of the bandwidth is for outgoing data serving the dashboard. I carefully designed vince to be extremely efficient for web analytics workloads. Please give vince a try.
- openplatypus 2y ago
  Hi, just FYI, the Wide Angle Analytics (my product) will cost you between 30 and 90 EUR per month for 1M and 10M accordingly. There are many web analytics providers with surprisingly high prices. We are cheaper and even planning on creating free tier by making smart use of resources and avoiding overpriced cloud providers.
- maeil 2y ago
  2M page views and not much revenue does sound like a choice. I have no affiliation to Plausible but 2M pageviews per month has such high revenue potential that if you'd monetize it (which frankly is the logical assumption they'd operate on), $189 month would be a trivial expense.
  - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
    You are partly correct, although it really depends. My site is in Finnish, which makes Google AdSense the only really viable option, unless I want to spend lots of time finding affiliate marketing revenue. That pays approximately 1.3 euros per 1000 page views, and does not work well with mobile page views on my site. I get 2M page views on high season, now it is off-season and visit counts are lower. I really get only around 20 euros per day on ad revenue, which makes around 600 euros per month. 200 euros per month cost is not "trivial". I have some other revenue, but that is small as well. Header bidding companies are interested to work with you if you have 5M+ page views per month. On a longer term, I think there is potential, but sure, I have made the decision to make the site foremost a public service, and revenue is secondary.
QuasarLogic 2y ago
can we compare it with Shynet? https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet Shynet is similarly self hostable, and has a tiny footprint..

283 points by gernest 2y ago

cebert 2y ago

If you haven’t checked it out yet, Serverless Website Analytics, is a great solution for this too. It’s easy to deploy and very inexpensive to run. I’ve been using it and am quite happy with it. https://github.com/rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics https://github.com/rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics

gernest 2y ago
Interesting, I just checked the readme. Very similar but looks like it only works with AWS and has a lot of moving pieces. How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions. Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases. With vince, I had to index embed the whole city data from geonames database to work around this.
- alam2000 2y ago
  [dead]
- reincoder 2y ago
  > How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions. > Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases. I work for IPinfo. I think you might find my conversation with Goatcounter's dev interesting: https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/765 https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/765 I pitched him to use our free country database because of MaxMind's EULA issues. MaxMind does not permit distribution of the database and requires end users to use their own token. Moreover, they actually charge thousands of dollars when you distribute the "free" database with a commercial intent. Now, we have a free IP to Country database that we offer under a straight CC-BY-SA 4.0 license without an EULA. It is free, comes with daily updates, has full accuracy, and you can even commercially redistribute the database (via providing us an attribution). I understand we do not have a free city database to offer, nor is our database lightweight because we have full accuracy. But you can check it out if you are interested. We do have a version with ASN (ISP) information as well.

8ig8 2y ago

Matomo is another one… https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/

rgbrgb 2y ago

> Full dashboard demo hosted on 6$ vultr instance https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/ https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/... 404 page not found

thangngoc89 2y ago
I found a link from github https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?auth=Ls9tV4pzqOn7BJ7-&demo=true https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?...
- XCSme 2y ago
  That looks exactly like Plausible
  - thangngoc89 2y ago
    I believe it's the same frontend code as Plausible. They replaced the backend with golang (instead of Nodejs)

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

Looks interesting. What sort of memory requirements does it have and how does it persist data?

gernest 2y ago
The demo, which survived HN hug of death is running on 6$ vultr instance. RAM : 1GB STORAGE: 25 GB so far bandwidth used is 3.6GB So, you can successful deploy vince on low spec servers depending on your expected traffic.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

colesantiago 2y ago

Great project keep it up it's good to see competition in this space. Plausible gets crazy expensive on their hosted option and it complex to setup (needs elixir + high memory requirements) If Vince gets 1:1 parity with plausible and has the option to use clickhouse, I'll consider moving a few servers and people I know over. Love that Vince is also a single binary as well.

just-tom 2y ago

The screenshot on your homepage looks very similar to plausible's https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ which is also open-source analytics software. Is it based on it? What are the differences? Edit: Just noticed the feature comparison in the readme.

dewey 2y ago
Also Plausible is almost stock TailwindUI elements + including the default color, so many sites look like that.

brokegrammer 2y ago

This is amazing! I self host Plausible but don't like depending on Clickhouse and Postgres because they're annoying to upgrade. What kind of database is this using though? I don't know enough Go to figure it out from the source.

tricked 2y ago
I checked the go.mod and it seems to be importing a module named pebble by cockroachdb i assume that's where everything is stored https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble
akshayshah 2y ago
It uses Pebble, the key-value store that backs CockroachDB.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  Just saw this notice: > WARNING: Pebble may silently corrupt data or behave incorrectly if used with a RocksDB database that uses a feature Pebble doesn't support. Caveat emptor! Slightly worrying for now running this in prod if there is a risk for silent data corruption, but hopefully in a few years Vince would have drivers for Postgres / Clickhouse.
  - rickette 2y ago
    This just warns about using Pebble with an existing RocksDB which isn't the case here. Pebble powers CockroachDB which is a Serious Database.
    - kamikazechaser 2y ago
      And Ethereum's state store. Which is an even more serious "database".
  - dangoodmanUT 2y ago
    Reread the sentence, it says if you mix it with RocksDB (another database that has compatible file formats)

t0mas88 2y ago

It says GDPR compliant and no cookies on the project page. How are unique visitors calculated? And I'm assuming it can't link conversions to campaigns without some cookie-alternative?

withinboredom 2y ago
No idea, but generally, a bloom filter would get you there without any identifying information being stored. The counts would merely be estimates at that point, not exact values.
pdyc 2y ago
most likely through one way ip hashing bounded by time duration. If you have utm's in your url than it can track otherwise probably not.
beeb 2y ago
At least for Plausible, they state this (https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies): > Instead of tagging users with cookies, we count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website. Counting IP addresses is an old-school method that was used before the modern age of JavaScript snippets and tracking cookies. Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day. Old salts are deleted to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  > Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. Um... hashing IPv4 addresses, even with salt, does literally nothing to anonymise (assuming the output space is at least ~32 bits, which I think is safe to assume): they’ll still be PII. IPv6 addresses I’m not so confident about; maybe it would be sufficient for some parts, but it’s definitely inadequate for some concerns. (For IPv4, enumerating all four billion inputs is so completely practical that “one-way” is nonsense.) I’m almost certain this is legal theatre.

drchaim 2y ago

this is great, congrats!

lovegrenoble 2y ago

Is is a Plausible clone? https://plausible.io https://plausible.io

__jonas 2y ago
From the Readme: > vince started as a Go port of plausible with a focus on self hosting.

samdung 2y ago

This is great. I'm def going to use it. Minor bug: "See Live Demo Dashboard" url is wrongly pointed.

pdyc 2y ago

Looks exactly like plausible, may be change the ui a bit to avoid legal issues.

carlosjobim 2y ago
I was going to say that it looks exactly like BeamAnalytics, and now I'm confused to who's copying who...
- dewey 2y ago
  Because everyone is using: https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing
  - huhtenberg 2y ago
    It's not just the looks that are the same. The UX / mechanics are way too similar too, e.g. how you can apply filters (by URL, by referrer, by browser, etc.) to narrow down the stats view.
    - rkuodys 2y ago
      I would say pretty much the idea is as follow: "Let's do it so User would know how to use it before we are big", and once you're big enough - you can set the trend. But at the beginning it's just not worth it and highly risky
- serial_dev 2y ago
  I'm wondering when copying becomes just following industry best practices... Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky all look the same. Project management apps all reuse the same UI patterns. The "AI" logo looked pretty much the same for all companies for a while. Video sharing websites all use YouTube's layout. Forums like Reddit and HN share quite a lot in their looks. If you want to display website analytics, you will want to show the most important metrics at a glance, you'll need graphs showing visitors over time, top sources and pages... There is only so much you can do to display those and have users understand what's going on on your website.

notRobot 2y ago

The dashboard demo isn't working :(

zoidb 2y ago

My go-to self hosted GA alternative is goatcounter https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com. It would be interesting to know what advantages it has over it.

james-bcn 2y ago
Oh I like that main dashboard. Very simple.
- TravisPeacock 2y ago
  If you like that there is https://www.piratepx.com/ https://www.piratepx.com/ which is even more minimal (though less data), I also built something even MORE minimal (only API calls) https://github.com/teamcoltra/ninjapx https://github.com/teamcoltra/ninjapx but I'm certainly not recommending it. It is super simplistic (also the readme is embarrassing)
sandeepthroat 2y ago
[dead]
huhtenberg 2y ago
Does it allow filtering visited page list by a specific referrer and vice verse?
- zoidb 2y ago
  Yes, it does if I understand what you mean. You can see the traffic distribution (what paths were accessed) broken down by referrer.

cpursley 2y ago

How would y’all go about building analytics into a professional marketplace type of app where you can provide the professional with their own profile page stats (in a reliable way)?

Oras 2y ago

If you don't have plans to offer saas, what are you trying to achieve from it? I mean, it is quite nice to have binary installation hosted on a single VPS, but will you support it?

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
FOSS lives!

rasso 2y ago

Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server? If so, it might really be „for everyone“. Otherwise, we are stuck with matomo.

diggan 2y ago
> Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server? Since they usually offer software via cPanel and alike, seems unlikely unless you give it lots of time for the project to first get popular enough to get on the "admin panels" mind, and secondly for them to integrate it. Besides, do people really pay 10 USD/month for shared hosting? Sounds really expensive when you can grab VPSes for half that price and run whatever software you want, not just what they've packaged for you. I guess ongoing maintainace is included in that price, but still sounds kind of expensive for what you get.
- rasso 2y ago
  I don‘t know… around here (Germany), that‘s pretty common. No need to manage anything, no usage-based cost, … my favourite is https://all-inkl.com https://all-inkl.com. OG no-bs hosting for boring tech.

manishsharan 2y ago

I think the reason some of us continue using Google Analytics is its demographic data. That information is not available elsewhere as far as I know , which I admit is not a lot.

paradite 2y ago

Not sure why I would use this over Plausible CE on docker. Does it consume less memory/CPU? Also I am pretty sure Plausible CE doesn't limit number of sites / events, unlike what's listed in "Comparison with Plausible Analytics".

deleted 2y ago
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written-beyond 2y ago

Code quality is pristine, really great job! I see that you've used protocol buffers, can you expand on why? I am aware of the benefits it offers but I think it adds a bit of mental overhead initially due to it being an additional type system you have to understand. Also why are you using pebble exactly? I was interested in seeing how you're managing your geo databases because that's usually the most mind numbing part of handling analytics if your cloud provider doesn't add that information into the request header already. However, I can't understand why you'd use pebble over something like sqlite.

gernest 2y ago
Thanks, > Why protocol buffers ? They are very good for defining API boundaries, in vince we only use them for configuration and admin structure. We use Roaring Bitmap based storage, so fundamental units persisted are Bitmap containers. > Also why are you using pebble exactly? Well, vince is write heavy and any LSM based key value store would have been nice. It happens pebble is the best option for us. Also, we don't use transactions (We batch writes and use snapshots for reads). Combining with the fact we rely on pebble batch Merge api. The merge api allows us to do efficient updates. Since we only store bitmap containers, when doing update we just do a container union of observed values of a key. Bitmap unions are pretty fast and efficient. I hope I covered all your questions.
- written-beyond 2y ago
  It answered them alright, but really opened a few hundred more. I appreciate your time!

skeptrune 2y ago

Cool that there are so many of these now. Currently self hosting plausible and it does seem quite barebones. Will have to give this a shot!

gonafr 2y ago

How this compares to umami (https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/)?

arcastroe 2y ago
I'm also interested in this. They seem to have very similar UI

vextea 2y ago

There seems to be some mentions of selling licenses (and pricing) in the source. What are the plans around that? https://github.com/vinceanalytics/vince/blob/f0c2c3cc38cbd8c6263993163e102dd339d2f44d/internal/web/templates/stats/site_locked.html#L19 https://github.com/vinceanalytics/vince/blob/f0c2c3cc38cbd8c...

gernest 2y ago
When I started working on vince, I thought I could bootstrap a sustainable business, that was about 3 years ago. My dream for a business is practically dead now. That snippet is a relic of early days of vince and I will remove it. I am currently looking for work, and will be maintaining vince as usual (I do a lot of open source stuff) since I also use it with my hobby projects. I'm struggling finding remote roles now, since remote now means Remote US or Remote EU and I'm stuck here in Tanzania. So, don't worry, I also use vince so I will keep hacking on it.
- vextea 2y ago
  Makes sense, wish you the best of luck!

sira04 2y ago

Looks great! I found a small bug, if you click Expand in the Top Pages section, the Time on Page column has NaNs. Dark mode for the dashboard and showing realtime current visitors in the <title> would be great.

cchance 2y ago

"see live dashboard" button on main page just... goes to the top of the page lol

slyall 2y ago

Going through the docs I find you don't actually have a bit about how to make your website to use it. I mean I can work it would and it'll be obvious to proper front end developers but at not point do you say: "Add the following line to you page source to send data to Vince"

lomkju 2y ago

Nice Work! Very easy to install and use. I deployed this on our cloud (excloud.in) in less than 2 mins. Anyone you can use the below k8s manifest to deploy it to their k8s cluster. Just change the admin password before doing so. https://gist.github.com/lomkju/90fe7500d8cf854bf3b7c2f26aa580e0 https://gist.github.com/lomkju/90fe7500d8cf854bf3b7c2f26aa58...

gernest 2y ago
Thanks, that is very nice setup. Does it always pull the latest vince image? Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts https://vinceanalytics.com/charts
- lomkju 2y ago
  > Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts https://vinceanalytics.com/charts Oh cool, didn't see that in the docs. > Does it always pull the latest vince image? Yes haven't specified any tag so should default to latest.

kukkeliskuu 2y ago

This is great. For me the commercial Plausible is just not plausible. I have a site with 2M page views, with most of the pages cached, which keeps the server costs minimal, I pay around 50 USD per month. I don't get much revenue from the site. I want to show visit counts on the site. For 2M page views, Plausible (with the stats API) would cost 189 USD per month, quadrupling my costs.

gernest 2y ago
This is one of the reason I created vince. For reference, the demo is hosted on a 6$ vultr instance, the last 3 days it handled about 11.9K pageviws with 4.3K unique visitors. I have just checked the vultr dashboard. Bandwidth = 3.37 GB ,vCPU usage = 1% (yep one percent) , Current charges = 1.06$. Majority of the bandwidth is for outgoing data serving the dashboard. I carefully designed vince to be extremely efficient for web analytics workloads. Please give vince a try.
openplatypus 2y ago
Hi, just FYI, the Wide Angle Analytics (my product) will cost you between 30 and 90 EUR per month for 1M and 10M accordingly. There are many web analytics providers with surprisingly high prices. We are cheaper and even planning on creating free tier by making smart use of resources and avoiding overpriced cloud providers.
maeil 2y ago
2M page views and not much revenue does sound like a choice. I have no affiliation to Plausible but 2M pageviews per month has such high revenue potential that if you'd monetize it (which frankly is the logical assumption they'd operate on), $189 month would be a trivial expense.
- kukkeliskuu 2y ago
  You are partly correct, although it really depends. My site is in Finnish, which makes Google AdSense the only really viable option, unless I want to spend lots of time finding affiliate marketing revenue. That pays approximately 1.3 euros per 1000 page views, and does not work well with mobile page views on my site. I get 2M page views on high season, now it is off-season and visit counts are lower. I really get only around 20 euros per day on ad revenue, which makes around 600 euros per month. 200 euros per month cost is not "trivial". I have some other revenue, but that is small as well. Header bidding companies are interested to work with you if you have 5M+ page views per month. On a longer term, I think there is potential, but sure, I have made the decision to make the site foremost a public service, and revenue is secondary.

QuasarLogic 2y ago

can we compare it with Shynet? https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet Shynet is similarly self hostable, and has a tiny footprint..