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echelon

> Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.

Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd be keen on trying something new.

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Plausible Analytics is a good choice: https://plausible.io/

They also have a nice Fediverse presence and quite open about what they do even down to their user stats.

Use their free self-hosted one, though. They have bugs in their paid service that they won't fix and their support sucked.

On the other hand the paid version is no fuss, affordable and works great. Its much cheaper than fiddling with how to selfhost it. Not sure what bugs would be in paid that are not in the self hosted one. It´s same thing.

Bugs aren't in their code. It's the way they've configured their server that hosts the .js. Their headers are fucked up so some browsers will never load the .js correctly, and you'll never know about it. So your stats will never be remotely true.

What bugs did they refuse to fix?

+1 to Plausible's self-hosted version. It was easy to get started and works well (at least for my basic use cases).

May I suggest a cookieless and codeless solution with data stored in the EU: https://www.hockeystack.com

We're building the most comprehensive, but still easy-to-use analytics tool out there. Specifically useful for SaaS businesses that want to collect and unify marketing, product engagement, sales, and subscription revenue data.

Why is "data stored in the EU" a selling point?

I've seen tons of similar analytics products pop up in the last year and have avoided them all for having out-of-country data storage (and usually less functionality, etc). With how volatile data-related laws have been in the EU the past few years, IMO it feels risky to try to store anything there, let alone view it as a feature!

I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Data privacy laws are among the strongest in the world here. It is a selling point because of that, but also because there are laws against sending user data to non-EU countries.

>Data privacy laws are among the strongest in the world here

The fear is that you would now have to adhere to those "strongest laws" by hosting your data there.

How is that a bad thing?

Less risk is good for businesses

You have way more risk storing your data in a potentially un-private way in the US.

It feels risky to have my data stored anywhere else other than the EU. Feels like my data is just up for grabs anywhere else with no clear privacy protection. Imo EU is the best place to have your data.

I think you're putting your finger on why it is a selling point. You're avoiding them because they're out of country, and that makes sense. For Europeans, the default has been "US hosted data" for a long while, and having options that store data in our jurisdiction is thus a selling point.

Fewer jurisdictions is almost certainly going to be easier, and these options offer that for the European market.

Thanks for the explanation. HN is so notoriously US-centric at times that it didn't occur to me that these services offer the same perks from the other side of the pond.

Your pricing is an order of magnitude too high, given there are better free solutions out there. Would be like me selling a search engine service for $99 a month when Google and Bing exist.

We just switched to Matomo - lots to learn, but the data better is by far. AND it supports Do Not Track & is GDPR compliant :) https://matomo.org/

if the primary issue here is data loss...isn't part of the solution to also find a way to take more ownership over the data, regardless of what you're using for analytics?

i.e. instrument a standard spec with something like www.Rudderstack.com and write it to your warehouse/datalake + whatever analytics tool you want.

That way if you ever want to move off your analytics tool (or a solution providing the data spec), you still own the data for whatever you replace it with.

By sending the data to the WH, also lets you own any proprietary data you create - like the custom PPC model referenced in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707913

full disclosure - Rudderstack employee

Look, not to rag on your employer's product too much - I'm sure it works for some people. But the first thing I checked was the pricing: $750/month just to get some graphs in grafana (and support, if you're a business and care about that kind of thing), and SSO is in the "contact us" enterprise tier.

It's compliant if you show a cookie banner on your website. It not really privacy-friendly as you are still setting cookies on your users devices.

There is one point from the Google announcement that I fully agree with and that is that the future of analytics is cookieless by design (only google won't be a part of this)

Is this [1] relevant here?

Edit: I am asking because I know that there are better alternatives than matomo. But there still needs to be some alternative for 'oldschool' hostings with LAMP stack.

[1]: https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/how-do-i-use-matomo-anal...

Throwing in another choice: nocookieanalytics.com great interface and very simple. Just what I needed to see which one of my blog posts were famous, (none of them are)

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