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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of Simple Analytics but that pricing model is out of reach open source projects like PortableApps.com. Separating out by page views is tough when I only need a single user and don't care about support. $600 a year for up to a million page views per month and "contact us" for more means it'd probably be at least a couple thousand dollars a year.

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Honest question -- why do you need analytics on an open source project like the one referenced? What information could they possibly get from it that matters to what they're doing?

I've used GA once on an open source focused blog, and the information was entirely "interesting" but I didn't get anything useful out of it other than a vague "hey people are visiting" picture that really changed nothing about what I was doing.

Has analytics changed to be more useful? Who cares what countries people are visiting from? I feel like people don't question their need for analytics as much as they should and just automatically do it.

It's very handy for working to set up partnerships/sponsorships to help keep the project going, help bring other apps on board to use our open source format, and to track where site visitors are coming from to determine what languages we should add to the site (as either just a landing page or a full translation) or the software platform (currently in 56 languages).

I guess I can see that, do potential partners and sponsors not just accept a website counter? I guess an outside company is sort of an auditor on that kind of things. Language localization stuff is about the only reason I could think of, and even then like... don't open source projects almost always rely on passionate users for translations?

Thanks for the explanation in any case, I at least can picture the first working with bigcorp that doesn't know any other way of measuring the impact of what they fund.

You can use an open-source alternative like https://umami.is/

Thanks, I'll check it out.

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