JackWritesCode

> I think self-hosting is the solution. This way, there is no company that will store centralized user data, which is the biggest privacy issue for analytics.

Your opinion will change in time. It all comes down to the principles of the company and who has control of it. That's why Fathom hasn't taken venture capital. As soon as you bring in people who don't share the same values as you, things start going downhill. You do not need to store centralized user data to run a sustainable competitor to Google Analytics

We're going to make our stance clear with our next release of Lite. We definitely made some mistakes with regards to V2. Originally we had planned to open-source it, but then we decided against it.

Before looking at accuracy, you already have compliance challenges with logging IPs / user agents and using it for analytics purposes.

I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth

I mean outside of HN :) HN makes up < 1% of our customers

We are 2 indie developers trying to build a sustainable business. We are trying to compete against Google. The idea that the open-source package is responsible for our success is ludicrous. Our success came from thousands of hours of work. You’ll believe the narrative you choose. You’re entitled to that. We will always be “liars” to you because we chose to spend our time building up the paid service. You feel like we should open source all of our code, that’s fine. This conversation isn’t productive, and you seem spiteful, so I’m retiring. And I hadn’t realized that you were the creator of DB browser, that was just a recent example I’d been discussing with friends. Good luck with your chosen path. Please hug your family and take some time to relax.

Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time.

Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools:

Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/

Table Plus is about 3 years old, SQLite is 6 years old. I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. Everyone talks about it and they innovate fast. They work full time on it too, $59 a license. They are so active, and have so many great features. Full time salaries help with that. SQLite has $102 in Patreon support. Table Plus makes that in 2 sales.

Look at Sequel Pro. One of the best products in the game but it never built a sustainable business model and it wasn't economically viable to continue, and look at it now.

I'm happy to say that we're achieving our goal every day. Our goal is to build a sustainable, profitable business (profitable businesses don't typically close down) that we can we can work full time on every day, moving people away from Google Analytics. For every 1 negative comment we get, hundreds / thousands of people signing up for Fathom.

We've spoken about it here too: https://usefathom.com/podcast/opensource

We really appreciate people like you, thank you. And on a personal level, I respect your "BREAKING THROUGH TWO PARTY POLITICS" tagline.

Thanks for your input here, Gordon. It doesn't sound harsh at all, you clearly care about privacy regulations and you're trying to help. Ultimately, we had moved based on conversations with lawyers. But as I say, we are rolling out changes this week & next, so it doesn't matter what we think about the regulation :) And thanks again for the challenge.

Like I say, we've had lawyers review our docs. Even the term "fingerprinting" has more nuance to it. Fingerprinting is used as a way to attempt to set a permanent cookie / identify an individual, and their actions. We don't do this.

And we definitely agree that it's bonkers.

I can't say anything here until we've got our press release out.

Yes - Fathom Lite would need a good refactor to not use cookies.

So strange. I've run it through multiple checkers and all of them are valid. No other issues reported, just this one.

Yes it does - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...

Our goal is long term sustainability of privacy-focused analytics. We're achieving that. We tried to do it with the OS codebase, and the original tech guy left the project. The MRR was around $1,300 between 2 people after many months.

When we focused on building a business, we were able to become a much more viable competitor to Google Analytics.

The reason we haven't written off Fathom Lite is because we've always had plans to come back to it this year and put out an update. Will we be launching new features? No. Will we be fixing bugs and ensuring it's a solid product for individuals? Absolutely.

We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey area when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's guidance, it talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our technology isn't cookie-like. And our processing isn't cookie-like either. We've had lawyers look at our documentation and all of them have said it's a grey area.

You'll know this but some people reading might not: Under GDPR, there are multiple legal bases for processing and we rely on legitimate interest. PECR / ePrivacy is the grey area for us and other services.

Having said all of this, we're fortunately moving away from requiring any compliance at all... by avoiding the complexities all together. We're rolling a refactor to our data collector over the next few weeks, and we won't have to have these conversations about grey areas anymore :) We've hired a top-tier privacy consultant and are going to be deploying a huge update, putting us at the top of the list for compliant analytics. Every single privacy-focused analytics service is in a grey area right now (some think they're not but they are). We will be the first to move out of this GDPR / ePrivacy grey area dance.

As you say, you see the logic behind the implementation we had, but we're dealing with politicians who don't understand the difference between Google Analytics and privacy-focused analytics. And that's fine, the work they've done has lead to better privacy for everyone, so we appreciate them.

Thanks so much, really appreciate the comment here :)

Good point, heh. We're going to be improving speed of aggregation, real time dashboard, page / ref level metrics, more advanced goals and various other pieces.

You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

Absolutely. We recommend custom domains (https://usefathom.com/support/custom-domains) but you could proxy through to the collector, no problem. It’s a great way of doing it

We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date

Strange. Fully valid certificate. Try hard refreshing a few times.

Opportunity cost. Hacker News has some of the best developers in the world reading it. $100-500 / hourly rates. Why would they spend their time building & maintaining something when they could pay $140 / year for a top tier, privacy-focused analytics product like Fathom, where both founders work full time on it?

Then you have redundancy of data. How are they backing up historical data? Are they running with failovers? How will their analytics do in the event that they get a hug of death from Hacker News or Reddit? There are so many factors to consider.

I don't think we should discourage people from rolling their own if they enjoy it. Heck, I've built things that existed. That's how we get better. I'm just sharing why a lot of developers won't roll their own.

Yes, Netlify Analytics are bad. Try Fathom.

There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”. You’re sending data to a company that has a huge amount of privacy scandals.

We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours, but here’s what’s helped them: https://usefathom.com/blog/switch

Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case.

For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

For now

GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

SA is good, and Adrian prices their services responsibility. Fathom charges $24 / month as our 2nd tier and I do believe Adrian should offer a middle tier too. But I know nothing about his business behind the scenes, so I can’t comment. Ultimately, you can be confident that he prices his service to be sustainable, which we really respect.

Thanks for all the kind words about https://usefathom.com. We’ve been in business since 2018 and both founders now work full time on it.

We’re fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars in venture capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We are priced fairly, and at a level that allows us to ensure the longevity of our business.

We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion dollar companies and individuals. Everyone cares about privacy and legal teams love us.

We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies. A lot of people have read our article on cookie-free tracking, but that article is outdated now. We’re also launching a new method over the next few weeks which is game changing, which we’ll blog about.

Our infrastructure is highly available and runs across multiple servers. We don’t run our services from a single VPS, and have availability in multiple availability zones for everything. We pay premiums for our infrastructure because we take our customers data very seriously.

We allow you to set-up a custom domain in less than 2 minutes, comfortably passing ad-blockers. Or if that’s not your cup of tea, you can enable honor-DNT and respect ad-blockers.

We are built to handle billions of pageviews a month, we’ve poured hundreds (thousands?) of hours into refining our aggregation script, and we’re the leading solution on the market.

Don’t forget, we also offer unlimited uptime monitoring as part of your plan, sending alerts by SMS, Telegram, email and Slack.

Finally, we run a popular podcast called Above Board, where we talk about business & privacy.

If you haven’t already checked us out, you should.

Thanks so much, glad you had such a good experience :)