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Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

simpleanalytics.io

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Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#21

Post by IshKebab »

gryzzly wrote: post #12

The idea is great, but price is way too high for a simple site. Many people are interested in anonymised data like pageviews and geographical distribution, for example, but these people pay 10€/year for domain and often 0 for hosting for static site generators. 12€/month is just really expensive at this level, but good luck and I’m sure for many people it’s totally fine price.

I agree. It would be better to make the pricing proportional to traffic and have a free tier. With a single price you're both pricing out small people who just host blogs or whatever and aren't going to pay more than $10/year, and also way undercharging businesses who don't really differentiated between $10/month and $50/month.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#23

Post by nhooyr »

AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

Why would sending requests as JSON require an extra request?

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#24

Post by always_good »

harianus wrote: post #19
lucideer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This look great—have bookmarked it for future projects. I would however a little more skeptical with tools claiming to be privacy-first than I would be with GA (who I presume are not privacy-first). On that note, some quick questions: - Any plans to open source? I've used Piwik/Matomo in the past, and while I'm not a massive fan of the code-quality of that project, it's at least auditable (and editable). - You say yo…

- No plans to go open source with the backend, but I do show the code that is run in the browser. The visualisation of the data is not super important I think. - I don't save IP's, not even in the logs. - I don't have unique pageviews at the moment. I will in the future. If the referrer is the same as the current page, I will measure that as a non-unique. What do you think?

Doesn't seem like a very useful measure of uniqueness.

What if you had one-day retention of IP addresses for per-day unique views? Seems like too important of a metric to eliminate completely, and one-day retention seems like a decent trade-off at the expense of being able to do unique analysis over longer time periods.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#25

Post by harianus »

consto wrote: post #16
AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

This is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for. I recently ditched Google Analytics and all other possible third party resources (except for YouTube which I implemented a click to play system) on my blog (consto.uk). I just have a quick question. What subset of the javascript implementation does the tracking pixel provide? If all that is missing is screen size, I might just choose that to avoid running thir…

I practice, you can copy the code to your server. You could subscribe to repo updates on https://github.com/simpleanalytics/cdn.simpleanalytics.io and update your code if the changes make sense to you.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#26

Post by harianus »

nhooyr wrote: post #23
AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

Why would sending requests as JSON require an extra request?

Explained here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS (search for preflight)

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#27

Post by always_good »

RealDinosaur wrote: post #9

Few Questions: How likely is this to be blocked by uBlock Origin/Firefox private mode (easy-list etc). Do they have any rules what they consider to be 'ethical analytics'? How much overhead does this analytics package have on page load. Have you considered a free tier for up to 1k page views a month for example? How can this track conversions for A/B testing? This is one of the most common usages of analytics in my e…

It would be blocked immediately by the major lists. They respond just as quickly to much smaller "threats".

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#28

Post by harianus »

IshKebab wrote: post #21
gryzzly wrote: post #12

The idea is great, but price is way too high for a simple site. Many people are interested in anonymised data like pageviews and geographical distribution, for example, but these people pay 10€/year for domain and often 0 for hosting for static site generators. 12€/month is just really expensive at this level, but good luck and I’m sure for many people it’s totally fine price.

I agree. It would be better to make the pricing proportional to traffic and have a free tier. With a single price you're both pricing out small people who just host blogs or whatever and aren't going to pay more than $10/year, and also way undercharging businesses who don't really differentiated between $10/month and $50/month.

I thought about this, but I love the unlimited part, competitors start with $9 a month for limited visits, for my your credit card charge will be always the same. No matter how popular your website will get. No surprises.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#29

Post by iampims »

always_good wrote: post #24
harianus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- No plans to go open source with the backend, but I do show the code that is run in the browser. The visualisation of the data is not super important I think. - I don't save IP's, not even in the logs. - I don't have unique pageviews at the moment. I will in the future. If the referrer is the same as the current page, I will measure that as a non-unique. What do you think?

Doesn't seem like a very useful measure of uniqueness. What if you had one-day retention of IP addresses for per-day unique views? Seems like too important of a metric to eliminate completely, and one-day retention seems like a decent trade-off at the expense of being able to do unique analysis over longer time periods.

Don’t retain the IP address, retain a hash of the IP address.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#30

Post by slazaro »

gryzzly wrote: post #12

The idea is great, but price is way too high for a simple site. Many people are interested in anonymised data like pageviews and geographical distribution, for example, but these people pay 10€/year for domain and often 0 for hosting for static site generators. 12€/month is just really expensive at this level, but good luck and I’m sure for many people it’s totally fine price.

Agreed. Maybe a free or very cheap ($5 or $10 a year, something like that) for the very basic stuff: pageviews and referral urls maybe.
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