Make your website a black hole to big tech

This is just an advertisement for the company. It doesn't really say anything substantive. "Google bad, we better!"

Most people I know with small websites will not pay $15/month for analytics. The privacy part of it is also not really the concern of small website owners.

This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik).

I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog.

If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize it for you.

I've been using Fathom for about a little over a month now and I love it. I researched the privacy-focused analytics products out there and it came out on top: https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...

This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about $200/year).

Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?

I have not used Google Analytics in years. There are so many extraordinary features that I ended up wasting too much time with it without any substantial gain. Now you'd have to pay me to use it. For small sites, it is overkill.

I don't get this. Small personal website are not going to pay money. Business websites in general will not leave GA and not because of the analytical aspect but because of the integrations. Businesses use Google Ads, GA ties in closely with Ads. Then you connect to Data Studio for your dashboards. And deploy through GTM. It's a whole eco system that's hard to replace by a single piece of software. As much as I'd love to stick it to Google as a person responsible for a business site I can't afford it.

Fathom "Doesn't use cookies" - so how does it have any concept of things like sessions and unique users then? I really want to know. The website doesn't explain this, it just drops that line and walks away. This is like saying a car "doesn't need tires" - sounds interesting, but wtf does that mean?

I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.'

I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks - though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS.

Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern.

(of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil and scary).

Is there any analytics kind of product that just pulls information from web server access logs?

There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)

Happy (recent) Fathom customer. I use it on a handful of small side projects.

I hope there is space in the market for a product like this. I did a reasonable amount of research and the $14/month is worth it for the handful of side projects I use it on.

Their marketing can be a little earnest, but for me the product strikes the right balance between the info provided, privacy, and cost.

I still don’t understand why small website owners don’t just use their server logs.

They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being inactive.

The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular but the rest seem similar.

Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so you lose cool 5-year growth stats.

I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else.

Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.

If I don't use Google Analytics on my website, but 70% of my visitors visit using Chrome, Google knows what's going on regardless.

I can't imagine to pay $14/m for my personal website

You should have a more killer product than google analytics to have people pay for it ! People don't care about privacy at the point they talk ;)

The title is misleading. This isn't about Big Tech. It's about Google specifically. Why not name them?

Piwik.