It was actually your Show HN from a few months ago that prompted me to add 'analytics' to my to-do list.
For the past years of running my site, I've had basically no analytics. I have the site in Google Webmaster Tools which shows stats on the Google clicks, but other than that there isn't much. At the moment traffic from everywhere but Google is completely unaccounted for.
I also disabled web server logging completely in May when GDPR came in.
Simple Analytics looks really good, and it's on my personal list of 'cool startups to use in the future', however for my particular site, there are a couple of issues:
- Adblock users
- JavaScript
The reason I'm so interested in log analysers is that the data is closer to network/traffic statistics than it is analytics/tracking. I think that a massive portion of the traffic to my site will be with Adblock, so if all of it is unaccounted for then the numbers will be way off.
Also, my site is strictly JavaScript free. It does look like you offer a <noscript> version though. My site is locked down with a super-tight Content Security Policy, and including an external JS file would be too big of a risk in my opinion.
As far as I can see, Simple Analytics isn't able to count unique visitors. This is what makes it so good when it comes to privacy and security, but it's a stat that I'd really like to see. I've started putting together my own solution using a bloom filter for this, as nikonyrh suggested in this thread.
So overall I think that Simple Analytics is great and I would love for more sites to adopt it, rather than going down the guy with a camera and notebook route (as shown in your promo video!). However for my particular project, it isn't suitable at the current time. As I said though, it's on my list and I can definitely see it been useful for other projects that I may be involved in.
Thank you :)