Make your website a black hole to big tech(usefathom.com)
usefathom.com
Make your website a black hole to big tech
https://usefathom.com/news/blackhole
83 comments
This is just an advertisement for the company. It doesn't really say anything substantive. "Google bad, we better!"
It's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products. We're as surprised as you that this ended up on the front page.
But you submitted it. You ought to know that submitting an article can cause it to appear on the front page. You also ought to know better than to submit advertisements, yet you did it anyway.
It's got an upsell in it but it's not an advert.
>It's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products.
Their pitch is "we respect your privacy more than the other guy" instead of just "we respect your privacy". User privacy is the antithesis of what they do.
Their pitch is "we respect your privacy more than the other guy" instead of just "we respect your privacy". User privacy is the antithesis of what they do.
I'd say it's both, snickerbockers. Google Analytics wasn't built with privacy in mind and Google is in the advertising business primarily.
Most people I know with small websites will not pay $15/month for analytics. The privacy part of it is also not really the concern of small website owners.
This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik).
I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog.
If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize it for you.
This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik).
I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog.
If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize it for you.
I have a couple of small websites. Rather than inflict Google Analytics on my occasional visitors or pay for this, I just do without.
Besides, I think the only stance that genuinely respects the user's rights is the one that says no data should be collected, ever.
Besides, I think the only stance that genuinely respects the user's rights is the one that says no data should be collected, ever.
We collect total page views, total uniques, browsers, countries, device types and goal hits in aggregate.
Privacy started becoming more important when we started seeing the gross tactics companies used to identify you & link all of your actions / history to you. Fathom doesn't do this and never will.
Privacy started becoming more important when we started seeing the gross tactics companies used to identify you & link all of your actions / history to you. Fathom doesn't do this and never will.
Can't that information be gathered from http server logs?
In my experience Matomo is pretty bulky and hard to use. At the same time, Simple Analytics and Fathom are relatively expensive (but at a business standpoint, their pricing is good).
Looking at these as a developer, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
Looking at these as a developer, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
We have a Lite version too if $14 is too much: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
$14 is too much.
Not too much at all. But in case your budget is tight, you can move around some services, for example, I canceled my hosting account and moved all my websites to ZEIT Now, and I pay around ~11 USD for 7 sites and 20 API endpoints (serverless functions).
I have two sites in my Fathom Analytics account which I pay $14 USD/month. Keep in mind that you can add multiple sites to your Fathom account, you just need to keep an eye on the page views.
I have two sites in my Fathom Analytics account which I pay $14 USD/month. Keep in mind that you can add multiple sites to your Fathom account, you just need to keep an eye on the page views.
Disclaimer: I’m a fathom user.
$14/mo is not too much for me knowing my services and websites aren’t another point of interest in googles data mining and selling scheme.
$14/mo is not too much for me knowing my services and websites aren’t another point of interest in googles data mining and selling scheme.
Have you tried Countly alongside other GA alternatives by the way? Would like to hear your opinions on that as well.
clicky (clicky.com) is another good, privacy-focused analytics option.
I use matomo and it's worked great so far. You can buy plugins to record sessions etc It has privacy respecting settings allowing you to mask out sensitive data. You can additionally use it for gdpr cookie compliance and much more. Best of all, you control the servers and own all the data
I've been using Fathom for about a little over a month now and I love it. I researched the privacy-focused analytics products out there and it came out on top: https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...
This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year for this service (my whole box is about
$200/year).
Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?
Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted approaches?
I'm building one that's both cheaper (mostly free but at most $2 a month) and faster than Fathom. I'm onboarding some customers but I'm planning to launch in January!
http://sdan.io/pingpong
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
http://sdan.io/pingpong
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
Good luck. Building a sustainable business at $2 / month will be hard but we wish you the best :)
Given that I'm targeting the developer community, I understand that paying for stuff like this is a huge turn off (at least that's one of the main reasons I'm building this). In the long term I think I'll try making this more sustainable by selling to businesses (which in my mind and from what I heard makes more sense).
Anyways, thanks!
Anyways, thanks!
I've installed fathom and self-hosted it. Seems to work pretty well.
These collections propose a handful of alternatives:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ana...
https://nomoregoogle.com/
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ana...
https://nomoregoogle.com/
I also have a personal website and I just... don't put any analytics on it. Genuinely curious: what do you get out of having analytics on a personal site?
Analytics is useful to understand what content you write people are consuming. If you write a bunch of blog posts that get no traffic but a few articles that get a lot of traffic, you can begin to understand what content others are finding helpful.
I see surprisingly little discussion of web server log analysis. Would that suit your use case while avoiding client-side analytics?
Been using self-hosted Matomo (formerly piwik) for about 6 months. It does everything I need, but mileage will vary by use case. In terms of a feature matrix, it's significantly less powerful than GA.
For my personal site, I use the free tier of StatCounter.com -- have been for over a decade now. Their site doesn't do a good job of advertising that they have a free tier, but it does exist.
Fathom has a self hosted open source version which I found to be fine. I checked recently and it looks like commits have slowed down so I'm not sure if it's maintained.
Agree - not an option for everyone. Free version for personal websites or websites with <x> visits/month would be great.
Lite - "Scaling requires you to power down and then upgrade your server" - what?
Why don't give full version free for sites with low x visitors/month. One can easily upgrade if they see enough value. 2 cents.
Why don't give full version free for sites with low x visitors/month. One can easily upgrade if they see enough value. 2 cents.
That line needs updating as it doesn't apply to people running it serverless. That was aimed at the DO users who need to power down to upgrade.
And we're not in a position to offer a free plan but may do in the future.
And we're not in a position to offer a free plan but may do in the future.
I have not used Google Analytics in years. There are so many extraordinary features that I ended up wasting too much time with it without any substantial gain. Now you'd have to pay me to use it. For small sites, it is overkill.
It definitely is. As someone who just made some simple HTML sites on Github Pages, I just want some simple analytics without having to pay much.
That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
> 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?
> 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?
As a student (and a developer) I see paying $14 a month a huge expense. To really promote the privacy and accessibility for all, I'm building this to make it free and will absorb the compute costs if I have to for the sake of value for customers.
Finally, yes, I'm planning to utilize a variety of shuffling and hashing techniques to anonymize users, data, and all other aspects. At the moment, I'm focusing on getting under 90ms on average globally (which I have achieved, just not implemented into the master branch yet)... which is over 4.5x faster than Fathom's average of 420ms globally. More coming soon! Fill out if interested: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8.
Finally, yes, I'm planning to utilize a variety of shuffling and hashing techniques to anonymize users, data, and all other aspects. At the moment, I'm focusing on getting under 90ms on average globally (which I have achieved, just not implemented into the master branch yet)... which is over 4.5x faster than Fathom's average of 420ms globally. More coming soon! Fill out if interested: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8.
Your stats are wholly incomplete compared to Fathom, lack any kind of GUI, graphs, or date-based filters. I think the comparison in speed is like comparing an apple to an elephant :)
Yeah I'm lacking a ton of stuff. No GUI, nothing in fact. But the tracker I've implemented (not into prod yet) does get under 90ms globally.
Your service, which I've seen is serverless, is actually pretty fast compared to other services and for that I have to admire your work. However, as I've done some response time testing on Postman (https://twitter.com/notsuryad/status/1199201916850278400?s=2...) I've found that my service is getting right next to Google Analytics' response times.
I'll release more details about how I've conducted this soon, but I hope the best for Fathom (I've used Fathom self hosted before but ran into some issues).
Your service, which I've seen is serverless, is actually pretty fast compared to other services and for that I have to admire your work. However, as I've done some response time testing on Postman (https://twitter.com/notsuryad/status/1199201916850278400?s=2...) I've found that my service is getting right next to Google Analytics' response times.
I'll release more details about how I've conducted this soon, but I hope the best for Fathom (I've used Fathom self hosted before but ran into some issues).
Keep pushing man. We're getting between 300ms - 600ms response from your endpoint (from a single datacenter) but I wish you luck with hitting under 90ms average.
Actually addressed that on the website. Currently I'm getting an average of 1 second globally which is super slow. I'm going to migrate to the faster branch soon, which wouldn't be much of a problem, but am going to release a bunch of stuff alongside it.
I don't get this. Small personal website are not going to pay money. Business websites in general will not leave GA and not because of the analytical aspect but because of the integrations. Businesses use Google Ads, GA ties in closely with Ads. Then you connect to Data Studio for your dashboards. And deploy through GTM. It's a whole eco system that's hard to replace by a single piece of software. As much as I'd love to stick it to Google as a person responsible for a business site I can't afford it.
Not all businesses use ads or data studio though. Those folks are looking for quick and easy stats they can use to run their business, like what content is popular, what referrals are driving traffic. And, if they're a business, they are making money, and at least some can afford to pay for expenses like website analytics. Like all software, it's not for everyone in every situation, but it is for certain folks in certain situations.
Fathom "Doesn't use cookies" - so how does it have any concept of things like sessions and unique users then? I really want to know. The website doesn't explain this, it just drops that line and walks away. This is like saying a car "doesn't need tires" - sounds interesting, but wtf does that mean?
I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.'
I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks - though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS.
Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern.
(of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil and scary).
I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.'
I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks - though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS.
Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern.
(of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil and scary).
Is there any analytics kind of product that just pulls information from web server access logs?
There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)
There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)
Check out Logflare.
In either case, I'm building a cheaper and faster version of Fathom (http://sdan.io/pingpong). Currently I'm onboarding some customers. I'll try to see if I can incorporate web access logs as well.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
In either case, I'm building a cheaper and faster version of Fathom (http://sdan.io/pingpong). Currently I'm onboarding some customers. I'll try to see if I can incorporate web access logs as well.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
Goaccess works this way.
https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess
https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess
GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/) looks interesting, though I haven't had the chance to play with it yet.
Related "Show HN: I replaced Google Analytics with simple log-based analytics"[1]
- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876
- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876
GoAccess doesn't seem to have conversion funnel tracking. Or is available in some sub-feature or plugin?
You could LogStash your logs into ElasticSearch and then view them with Kibana. The ole ELK stack.
Happy (recent) Fathom customer. I use it on a handful of small side projects.
I hope there is space in the market for a product like this. I did a reasonable amount of research and the $14/month is worth it for the handful of side projects I use it on.
Their marketing can be a little earnest, but for me the product strikes the right balance between the info provided, privacy, and cost.
I hope there is space in the market for a product like this. I did a reasonable amount of research and the $14/month is worth it for the handful of side projects I use it on.
Their marketing can be a little earnest, but for me the product strikes the right balance between the info provided, privacy, and cost.
Appreciate the honest review :)
I still don’t understand why small website owners don’t just use their server logs.
They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being inactive.
The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular but the rest seem similar.
Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so you lose cool 5-year growth stats.
I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else.
Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.
They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being inactive.
The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular but the rest seem similar.
Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so you lose cool 5-year growth stats.
I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else.
Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.
If I don't use Google Analytics on my website, but 70% of my visitors visit using Chrome, Google knows what's going on regardless.
Google knows what's going on w/ 70% of your visitors, as opposed to 100%
Scary thoughts. More people are moving to Brave, which is great.
I've been using Firefox and DuckDuckGo for almost four years now!
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I can't imagine to pay $14/m for my personal website
I can't either. As someone who just wants simple, private, and cheap analytics, I wanted a product that could do so (all current products are pretty expensive).
That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
That's why, I'm building https://sdan.io/pingpong, which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in January.
It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.
If you want to stay updated, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8 and I'll keep in touch soon.
I do and I'm pretty happy with it. https://app.usefathom.com/share/hwimpavv/jolvera.dev
You should have a more killer product than google analytics to have people pay for it ! People don't care about privacy at the point they talk ;)
A "killer" product isn't for everybody. Not everyone needs all the options that Google Analytics offer, plus there are some people concerned about privacy, and products like Fathom and Simple Analytics are perfect for them.
The title is misleading. This isn't about Big Tech. It's about Google specifically. Why not name them?
It applies to big tech.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches etc.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches etc.
Yes, those things happened, but they're not relevant to this advertorial which is very clearly about Google Analytics. Facebook doesn't run Google Analytics. Yahoo doesn't run Google Analytics. Google does. It's just oh-so-convenient how people always name-and-shame every other company, but when Google is the culprit it's "big tech" in general.
Fair enough, point taken. We could've named Google in the title.
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Piwik.
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