Fathom Analytics Blog

Not open source but I'd highly recommend: https://usefathom.com/

Yes, you should absolutely not be using Google Analytics. They don't need more data, your users don't want to see cookie banners and most of you really don't need 99% of the data that you can filter through... I can't recommend Fathom (https://usefathom.com) enough. They have a huge focus on privacy-first tracking. You don't need to show a cookie banner and you can still track events etc. If you want $10 credit for signing up, use https://usefathom.com/james but otherwise, https://usefathom.com Seriously, Google Analytics sucks. Use anything other than that.

Yes! I'm currently using https://usefathom.com/, works pretty great

I'm not associated with them at all, but Fathom are worth looking into if you want an analytics platform that respects user privacy: https://usefathom.com/

Check out Paul Jarvis' Fathom https://usefathom.com/ Best of luck and link up your blog when ready ;)

https://GoAccess.io is great for analysing access logs. That said, there are solutions where a cookie allows for greater privacy because it allows you to leave sensitive data on the client versus having to store it on the server. For example, https://usefathom.com/ is an open-source self-hosted analytics tool that uses a cookie to enhance privacy.

For the surveillance conscious I can also recommend using Fathom (https://usefathom.com). I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and have only good things to say.

Woah this thread is packed. Most of these companies didn’t exist when we started Fathom back in 2018, so it’s great to see how the privacy-first analytics space is thriving. I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies. You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law. Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant. We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap…

As a small company using one of the providers (https://usefathom.com/) it offers us choice. We don't want to build and run our own analytics and we don't need the vast features of a Google Analytics or similar either. Even without the privacy benefit the set metrics we get now acceptable. We don't have, e.g. a growth manager who needs to report these, investors who question the or make decisions when one metric looks off. Legitimacy didn't come up once during our migration and we didn't look too closely to compare to our previous provider (Google Analytics). It's not the core of your questions but there's usecases where less metrics, less accuracy is good enough. Personally I have a background in metrics and reporting tools. I've been tasked to find and explain 0.3% differences between two reports or have cookie related (or timezone related) code getting reviewed by other engineers at previous companies. With millions of dollar at stake, Powerpoint meetings or investor or financial documention it makes sense to question every definition and the whole data pipeline. > Coolness over effectiveness? What's all the fuss really about? Ok, I admit, there's a bit of coolness factor. Paying $25/month to a small bootstrapped company (with a great podcast) beats feeding data to an ever growing global player (Google).

Hey Anthony, I really like your product. It's crazy fast, might solve one of my issue, is super simple to use, and the UI is gorgeous. I've a few questions though: - how do you compare to other privacy focused analytics tools, such as https://usefathom.com/ or https://simpleanalytics.com/? - it seems like you just launched your SaaS a couple of weeks ago. Why didn't you launch it earlier by removing some not strictly necessary/MVP features, such as the security login emails, the ability to manage multiple websites, a less scalable but simpler architecture ... ? - how much time have you spent developing the product? I've been working on my personal SaaS for more than one year, planning to launch it in the next few weeks. I'm still working at my 4/5 full time job, and I really wonder how you managed to deliver this beautiful product while still working fulltime. That would be a wonderful opportunity for blog article BTW. Great work!

Answering your GDPR question: we use cookie-less analytics with https://usefathom.com/ and we do not pass user data to the backend endpoints, which you can verify by viewing the network calls. When you upload the ZIP or CSV the extraction/parsing happens entirely client-side, and then we use auto-generated IDs to map connection data from the JSearch API response to the client-side stored connection data.

Have you looked at Fathom[0] or GoatCounter? [0] https://usefathom.com/ [1] https://www.goatcounter.com/

> Edit: The example blog also loads js, despite the "no javascript" claim. Like: <script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" data-site="WKWMFTPV" defer></script>. Perhaps that's not a default thing, but it seems odd to link to an example blog that doesn't match the sales pitch. Seems like this is loading Fathom analytics: https://usefathom.com/ Probably safe to turn off, as uBlock Origins and other ad blocking solutions would, depending on your settings. So I guess in a way the site itself works just fine without JS enabled and doesn't require it, but the authors have chosen to add analytics to see who uses their site, then.

I looked into this, and yes, there are some services that can do analytics without the cookie. E.g https://usefathom.com. However, the vast majority use cookies and the ones that don't often have a much higher cost. Ultimately, some of these alternatives that avoid the cookie law are simply finding tech work arounds. I have no doubt in my mind that the gov would find a way to require popups for those services if they were more prevalent.

Fathom's EU docs (https://usefathom.com/features/eu-isolation) seem to suggest that EU-hosted but US-owned cloud infrastructure isn't sufficient either though - you're exposing any data stored/transferred through there to access by the US government. That means Posthog self-hosted on an AWS server in Frankfurt wouldn't avoid this issue. What're the best options for non-US owned cloud providers? AFAICT Canada or many other countries with privacy laws would be fine, it's really the US specifically that's problematic.

For a very long time, I've been using shynet [0] on my personal blog. I've not played around the alternatives but there are quite a few: - Plausible: https://plausible.io/ - umami: https://umami.is/ - Fathom: https://usefathom.com/ [0]: https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

I like the simplicity of Fathom analytics https://usefathom.com I also switched from Google Analytics this year and happy I did.

Fathom is a simple analytics product. It can track page views and events, the script is fairly small, is GDPR compliant, and gets out of your way. https://usefathom.com

I have the same question. I've already launched my product and I haven't monitored anything so far. Except, looking for traffic. Well, basically all I do is watching users number, subscriptions and traffic. Users/subscriptions - in database, traffic - in https://usefathom.com/ But I'm a small SaaS. I'm not sure, I know that there are tons of metrics, funnels etc, but if the number of users/traffic small, should we that much care about indexes?

Try AWS Shield Advanced, you get to be assisted by AWS staff. There was a great write up recently about it at https://usefathom.com/blog/ddos-attack

And when people want analytics they often just really want headline numbers that do not require user tracking. E.g. I've started using Fathom [1]. It's very basic, but for the sites I use it on all I really want to know is if traffic is going up or down or if any specific pages are suddenly getting lots of traffic. [1] https://usefathom.com

https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for-a-better-… https://usefathom.com/ https://plausible.io/ https://simpleanalytics.com/ Some cost-effective alternatives off the top of my head

At first glance the design of this feels very close to fathom, another privacy-focused analytics tool https://usefathom.com/

Have you heard of Fathom Analytics? Maybe it meets your needs. https://usefathom.com

I was running a little go app called fathom that provided this functionality. It works well! https://usefathom.com

I have been in the process of moving all of my stuff off of Google services (while I have an excessive amount of free time during Shelter In Place. So I recently moved from Google Analytics to https://usefathom.com . I quite like it. I would like to see how many people read my stuff, but I value my privacy and would like to do the same for others. It's pretty good, and

Wondering how people feel about analytics on small sites such as these? Including a Google Analytics tag seems to go against the ethos of such a site, but a lot of people like to know who is visiting their blog and so including some sort of analytics should be an option. Self hosting seems to be a decent tradeoff. Analytics services like Fathom [0], which provides a free, self-hosted solution, let you track basic statistics about your site without the data being siphoned off to some company. I have seen discussion around whether the use of analytics should even be necessary, but I feel like that's a separate conversation :) [0] https://usefathom.com

Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section. [1] https://usefathom.com [2] https://simpleanalytics.com [3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible

This reminds me of https://usefathom.com/! Both solving an important problem in my eyes.

> it is overkill. > It definitely is. It is not, you pay $14 and you get basic analytics and this https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization that's worth the money for me. > It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple. What about user privacy? are you anonymizing the users?