After months of using Google Analytics I realized only about 50% of people accepted my cookie-popup. I had months of incorrect data for my website. I started looking for alternatives and eventually found Plausible, which is great (and open-source). Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on, it was just a hobby project.
Eventually I started making my own web analytics. Which actually isn't that hard. It took me about a month of working on my spare time every now and then. Being GDPR compliant basically means to not save any personal identifiers. At first I thought it would be easy since something like a public IP adress can't count as a personal identifier right? I was very wrong.
How it works: When a user visited my website I saved the IP and Header for 24 hours. Then if they visited again I checked the combination of IP and Header against the ones saved in my DB. If they were the same I simply added 1 view to my data. If they weren't the same I added 1 unique daily user and 1 view.
That's in short how it works. A few weeks later I realized if I had this problem then other would also have it. So I started working on Simplytics.dev. I had to do a lot of new stuff and re-build my code from the ground-up twice. Small things like OAuth was completely new to me and took up a lot of time.
But eventually I got here and just launched something that with the knowledge I have today wouldn't even take a third of the time recreating today. It's my first real "Launch" and it feels really good finally creating something AND publishing it. Instead of a montly fee I opted to make it a pay-once service. Right now it's priced at 49$ but I'll see how it works out.
If you got any questions on how it works Id love to answer them.
While admirable, a one time payment for a service you host is fair neither to you (what if I use it for 10 years) nor me (what if you shutdown tomorrow).
On the other hand, a one time fee for analytics I could deploy on my server a) makes financial sense for you and b) is an intriguing value proposition for me.
Have a look at https://once.com/
That's a beautiful site and a nice way to put it. But yes, you're right. While my server costs are low anough that just one user could cover months, it's still not sustainable. My plans is to move onto a "pay for what you use system" in the future.
But I have thought about making it self-hosted too. But there already is so many great products for that out there.
I wish there was a perfect way to do this. I despise subscriptions, I dislike pay as you go becasue it's too complicated, and finally, a one-time fee dosent really work when sold as a service as you said. But I guess these are the options for people not willing to self-host.
If you got any interesting reads on this topic please send em my way.
You haven't provided a working link to your service, you said "simplytics.dev" but that doesn't resolve to anything:
; <<>> DiG 9.18.18-0ubuntu0.22.04.1-Ubuntu <<>> simplytics.dev
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 60075
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;simplytics.dev. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
simplytics.dev. 1760 IN SOA aragorn.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2358025796 10000 2400 604800 1800
;; Query time: 7 msec
;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Mon Nov 25 16:52:36 CET 2024
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 108Thanks a lot, seems like i forgot to point the apex domain to the www version. It should be fixed now. If not, www.simplytics.dev should work until I got it fixed.
Hello HN, realized I should introduce myself and not just my project. I building stuff on the web and this is the second time something I created actually goes LIVE.
Before this I created a website displaying snow conditions for a few hundred locations in Sweden. I love skiing and ski-touring and wanted a better way to find the best conditions.
Right now I don't have much time to work on my projects since I'm doing mandatory millitary service, which is part of the reason Simplytics.dev took so long to launch. But I'm hoping I might soon make my first buck selling zeros and ones.
Id love to recieve feedback, Hugo
I signed up for an account and it seems you are showing a code snippet with an API key for client-side code. How do you handle authorization? Can anybody use up my 50k events if they steal the key?
No, that key is verified against your domain connected to your user credentials. Meaning that if someone else uses you key on their website, their POST request to my server will be declined because their domain is not the domain you provided.
But you're right, might be a good idea to change the name of the key or work it out completely, it does look like it could be a vulnerability from an outsiders persepctive.
I would love to check out the website, but it says the site can't be reached. Sounds promising though!
Thanks! I forgot to point the naked domain to the www. version. In the meantime, try this URL instead: www.simplytics.dev