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Comment by boffinism | Hacker News Reader

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc.

I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front page of HN I blew through their free tier in less than a day.

I wish there was something very basic that had a more generous free tier. At the moment my site literally apologises for using GA.

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Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to hear someone is using what I've built.

Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a blog that gets less than <50k views per year" :)

There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up).

About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN): even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours - that way you won't lose data during traffic spikes.

Hope it helps!

> even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours

That is super cool of you, to protect your users interests first.

Realise this is a blit blunt, but what you're saying is:

- I have this site

- I want analytics => they have some value to me

- I'm not willing/able to pay for it with my money

- I am willing to pay for it with my users' privacy.

That's the GA value equation. You get analytics, you pay with your users' privacy to feed the google advertising machine.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but we should be crystal clear on what's happening.

Seems like there's a bit of exaggeration here. "Not willing to pay" != "not willing to pay 10+€/month for 30 distinct semi-random numbers each month". There are plenty of people willing to pay low prices (comparable to a barely warm cup of some really bad coffee) for analytics to help them make decisions.

Imagine, you write one blog post per month. How much would you pay if I told you which of your blog posts this year has been the most popular one, and on which social media it got the most attention? 120€? Unlikely. Then what do you think would be the fair price of this information?

It's not exaggeration but you make a valid point: I might revise the 3rd bullet to read "I'm not willing to pay the minimum price the market offers".

But that's missing the point:

>Then what do you think would be the fair price of this information?

It's not how much you pay, it's who pays. With GA, you're deciding that your users will pay on your behalf.

Check out GoatCounter (http://goatcounter.com/). It's what I use for my personal blog, and it also has a free tier for non-commercial users (though I'd still recommend donating so they can stick around). They even have a no JS way to integrate tracking, as all I really care about is how many ppl are reading my blog.

I use Matomo, it runs on my home server, its open-source. Pretty sure you could run it on a Pi. There's a docker container that you can spin up in a few minutes.

https://matomo.org/

Seconded - set up on a project instance last weekend in about 5 minutes, and it has been chugging along swimmingly since! And they’ve been doing it for a long time, Piwik was great even before the rebrand.

+1, you own the experience and the data that way. Even if you don't use PHP in your projects, almost everywhere has PHP so it's not hard to host it.

> I wish there was something very basic

You can get rough user stats from the logs with grep, wc, sort and uniq, no need to burden the page with tracking.

Did you really look into this that much? Because there are a *lot* of free and self-hosted alternatives.

Here's a list I found with a quick (DDG!) search: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?platfor...

I am currently working on exactly this! I have always been dreaming of a low-cost, zero-effort web analytics.

So far I have made an open source library/service, I've been using it for my blog and a few other sites for over two months. It is available at https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics. You can see the example dashboard (fed with real data) at https://nullitics.com/dashboard/zserge.com. I'm now collecting all sorts of feedback from the early adoperts.

For the cloud version I decided to go with 1€/month, and I have often been criticised for choosing such a low price. However, I believe that I would rather be at a lower profit, but help bloggers, hackers and other who want such a tool.

Hey it's nice you're offering this!

I'd just be careful with ultra-low prices, specially if you plan on having backups and multiple months/years of data retention.

Infrastructure costs alone can add up really fast, and don't underestimate how many hours of support a single customer might require.

Just friendly advice :)

Statcounter is free and its pretty light weight

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