Show HN: Fugu, open-source and privacy-friendly product analytics

This looks super neat. I'm building something very similar called graphjson. It's a super competitive space, but I think your OS + privacy friendly angle is a good one.

Best of luck on your journey!

I think it's good that unique user tracking is not possible with Fugu. In my opinion, a lot of developers and companies start tracking all kind of detailed user data only because it's possible and they feel like they might need it later. Data collection and analysation can become an obsession, that doesn't even really serve a real purpose anymore :D and is just invading peoples privacy for nothing

Hello HN!

Fugu is a product analytics software that focuses on privacy and simplicity. Oh, and it’s open source[0], too!

At its core, Fugu allows you to track events along with properties by calling the Fugu API. You can then analyze your events by looking at different time ranges, time aggregations, property breakdowns and creating conversion funnels.

Here’s an example request body that you might use:

  {
    "api_key": "very_secret",
    "name": "Fun event",
    "properties": {
      "color": "Blue",
      "type": "Oak"
    }
  }

Fugu doesn’t track unique users, not even anonymously. I believe that you can get enough insights without doing that, and that the incremental insights you get by tracking unique users is not worth the privacy trade-off. You can read more about my thinking in this post linked in the footnotes [1]:

I’ve used Mixpanel, Amplitude and PostHog before, and while they are good tools, they lacked the privacy and simplicity I was looking for. I didn’t need (nor wanted) integrations with other tools, screen recordings, feature flags, retention analyses and so forth.

That’s why I started to work on Fugu sometime last year and went in October. I’ve got a day job, and I only get to work on Fugu for a couple of hours each week.

You can host the open-source version yourself for free, forever, without any feature restrictions. Additionally, I offer a managed cloud version and charge $9/month for it. You can try the cloud version for free - you don’t need to pay as long as you only track events in test mode (it’s meant for testing, and those events are deleted after 14 days).

Fugu is a Ruby on Rails monolith. I use Postgres for the database and Stimulus for the little JavaScript I need. For the charts, I use the awesome Chart.js library. It's hosted with DigitalOcean in their Frankfurt, Germany data center.

I'm looking forward to any questions or feedback you might have.

0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu

1: https://fugu.lol/why-fugu-doesnt-track-unique-users/