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Comment by ibudiallo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I have a couple of small websites. Rather than inflict Google Analytics on my occasional visitors or pay for this, I just do without.

Besides, I think the only stance that genuinely respects the user's rights is the one that says no data should be collected, ever.

We collect total page views, total uniques, browsers, countries, device types and goal hits in aggregate.

Privacy started becoming more important when we started seeing the gross tactics companies used to identify you & link all of your actions / history to you. Fathom doesn't do this and never will.

Can't that information be gathered from http server logs?

In my experience Matomo is pretty bulky and hard to use. At the same time, Simple Analytics and Fathom are relatively expensive (but at a business standpoint, their pricing is good).

Looking at these as a developer, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.

It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.

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

We have a Lite version too if $14 is too much: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

$14 is too much.

Not too much at all. But in case your budget is tight, you can move around some services, for example, I canceled my hosting account and moved all my websites to ZEIT Now, and I pay around ~11 USD for 7 sites and 20 API endpoints (serverless functions).

I have two sites in my Fathom Analytics account which I pay $14 USD/month. Keep in mind that you can add multiple sites to your Fathom account, you just need to keep an eye on the page views.

Disclaimer: I’m a fathom user.

$14/mo is not too much for me knowing my services and websites aren’t another point of interest in googles data mining and selling scheme.

Have you tried Countly alongside other GA alternatives by the way? Would like to hear your opinions on that as well.

clicky (clicky.com) is another good, privacy-focused analytics option.

I use matomo and it's worked great so far. You can buy plugins to record sessions etc It has privacy respecting settings allowing you to mask out sensitive data. You can additionally use it for gdpr cookie compliance and much more. Best of all, you control the servers and own all the data

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