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Comment by freddyym | Hacker News Reader

To make matters worse, the site is using third party trackers, so your data is already being abused the second you open with the site. Its also closed source. I may sound paranoid, but I won't be using the service.

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In SaaS, you're not going to find many products that don't use trackers and are open source, as much as that may be philosophically interesting to see. I actually want a SaaS company to track my behavior so they see what's wrong, fix bugs, and improve the product as a whole.

Why do they need to use external services to track you?

because external services have a free tier and they think it would cost them too much to make themselves.

Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.

I have actually built a self-hosted alternative to Hotjar[0] and there are also some other platforms I think, so you can indeed have great analytics without relying on 3rd party services or having to build your own tool.

[0] https://usertrack.net/

Wow that looks great, I might give it a go. Where is the screen recording feature, I saw it was advertised on the landing page but don't see it on the demo. Also is it open source?

Thank you!

You can go to the "Visitors" list and from there you can see a summary of each visit and also view the recording.

Forgot to answer about Open Source.

userTrack is not free (open-source) but sold as a product for a one-time fee. As for the soure code: currently you get the original PHP backend code but only the bundled front-end code. I am also adding soon the option to download the original front-end code (TypeScript + ReactJS + MaterialUI).

I have thought about releasing userTrack as open-source, but I currently work full-time on it and I need to sustain myself, otherwise I couldn't spend the time to work on it. If I find a sustainable way to open-source it, I will.

This is super interesting. Thanks for the share! :)

Thank you!

Well, it was in my interest to share it, but I do think it's one of the best ways to improve user privacy while still being able to get valuable insights.

It's a personal project that I built and maintain in my spare time (nights and weekends). My only real goal with tracking is to understand how people use the service and where they might be getting stuck.

I'm by no means a UI or UX expert :)

I'm all for analytics, as long as it is done in the most privacy respecting way possible.

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