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Comment by alanfranz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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I'm building one that's both cheaper (mostly free but at most $2 a month) and faster than Fathom. I'm onboarding some customers but I'm planning to launch in January!

http://sdan.io/pingpong

If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.

Good luck. Building a sustainable business at $2 / month will be hard but we wish you the best :)

Given that I'm targeting the developer community, I understand that paying for stuff like this is a huge turn off (at least that's one of the main reasons I'm building this). In the long term I think I'll try making this more sustainable by selling to businesses (which in my mind and from what I heard makes more sense).

Anyways, thanks!

Your CSS might be missing some margins, just FYI.

It definitely is. I hacked it together a couple nights ago and left the mess there. Working on the backend to make it faster and reliable and I'll fix up the frontend.

I've installed fathom and self-hosted it. Seems to work pretty well.

These collections propose a handful of alternatives:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ana...

https://nomoregoogle.com/

I also have a personal website and I just... don't put any analytics on it. Genuinely curious: what do you get out of having analytics on a personal site?

Analytics is useful to understand what content you write people are consuming. If you write a bunch of blog posts that get no traffic but a few articles that get a lot of traffic, you can begin to understand what content others are finding helpful.

I see surprisingly little discussion of web server log analysis. Would that suit your use case while avoiding client-side analytics?

Been using self-hosted Matomo (formerly piwik) for about 6 months. It does everything I need, but mileage will vary by use case. In terms of a feature matrix, it's significantly less powerful than GA.

For my personal site, I use the free tier of StatCounter.com -- have been for over a decade now. Their site doesn't do a good job of advertising that they have a free tier, but it does exist.

Fathom has a self hosted open source version which I found to be fine. I checked recently and it looks like commits have slowed down so I'm not sure if it's maintained.

Here: https://fathom.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-source-dilemm...

Agree - not an option for everyone. Free version for personal websites or websites with <x> visits/month would be great.

Lite - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Lite - "Scaling requires you to power down and then upgrade your server" - what?

Why don't give full version free for sites with low x visitors/month. One can easily upgrade if they see enough value. 2 cents.

That line needs updating as it doesn't apply to people running it serverless. That was aimed at the DO users who need to power down to upgrade.

And we're not in a position to offer a free plan but may do in the future.

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