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Comment by josscrowcroft | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a lot of fun, but my main concern is with the pricing model. I can recreate much of this functionality for myself, without rate limiting, in a couple of hours with standard open source libs.

The value-add they offer is good, but I'm never gonna find out about it first hand because I'm not gonna pay to try it (even with a 30 day money-back guarantee)

I predict they would have far more luck if they open-sourced the basic library (so we could use it to get say 80% of the functionality ourselves BUT would need to self-host it etc. etc.) and then offered a hosted version for $$ per month.

Good luck!

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I agree, a lot of the useful stuff comes from the navigator object - browser, language, plugins etc.

The window object provides screen height, width and colour depth.

Modern browsers have geolocation as a JS API, but if you want it to be less accurate/less intrusive then an ajax request to a script that does a geo lookup on the IP would supply that.

The time on site and visits can be done by storing information in localStorage, or whatever the IE equivalent is called.

There are a few harder bits, but replicating most of the low hanging fruit is trivial for any web developer.

I went to the site expecting it to be an open-source library providing one convenient API into all the things you mention. In fact it wasn't until I went to the top menu looking for a Github or download link that I realized it was a hosted for-pay service. I think a library bringing all those things together (maybe without the geolocation part) would be useful, and I don't personally know of one.

I liked the idea, and had already needed parts of such a library, so I put together some stuff and made a free/open-source version.

https://github.com/codejoust/visitor.js

Whoa! Super impressed you turned this out so quickly. You should post it as a 'Show HN' story!

Also, props for renaming it to session.js (I think it's unfair to use their name)

This might spur the visitor.js guys to release part of their codebase as open source and continue to provide a paid service with extra support and features etc.

Pfft. Just add another remote dependency with its own round-trip to some unknown target which may or may not be well-adminned. What's the big deal?

Truly weird. A one-off license would sound reasonable, but $40 a month for a common script?

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