Why We Built Our Privacy-First Analytics Tool

We're web developers and, like many others, we tend to run a lot of side projects and small websites.

Naturally, we want to track the basics: how many visits a site gets and where traffic is coming from.

For a long time, we used Google Analytics. Over the years, it started to feel bloated and overly focused on tracking users for Google's benefit. We also tried smaller, privacy-first alternatives, which we liked - but as soon as we wanted to track more than a few sites or keep data longer than 30 days, the cost quickly grew into the hundreds of dollars per year.

At some point, we asked ourselves: why not dogfood this problem?

We wanted to keep things extremely simple: no cookies, no tracking people. Copy a script tag, paste it, and instantly see pageviews.

So we built a small MVP called PageviewsOnline. It's a privacy-first web analytics tool where stats are aggregated, public by default, and stored in the EU. It's designed to be EU privacy-compliant out of the box, which means no cookie banners are required.

The Core Ideas

• Privacy-first & EU-based - it's clear what data is collected and what is stored
• Simple - paste a script and pageviews are tracked automatically

Site-Level Configuration (Future Idea)

This isn't implemented yet, but we want to avoid user accounts and PII entirely. The goal isn't to build just another traditional analytics tool.

One idea is site-level configuration via something like /analytics.json (similar to /robots.txt), or possibly a public/private key-based encrypted file, allowing basic per-site customization without accounts.

The Elephant in the Room: Pricing

We know the project can't stay entirely free forever - hosting, storage, and bandwidth will add up. But the whole reason we started this was because we didn't want to pay $9/month per side project.

So the goal is to keep it free or affordable for as long as possible.

Right now, we're considering (and this may change):

• 5 years of data retention - regardless of plan, data won't be deleted. This allows upgrading or downgrading without fear of losing historical data
• One-time payments instead of subscriptions - for example: select a domain, pay $9, and unlock extra features for a year. After that, you might not need them - and that's fine. The data is still there if you want to upgrade again later

We're Looking for Honest Feedback

• If you run a small site or side project, would something like this be useful?
• Is there anything obviously missing or something that would stop you from using it?
• Do you think the project - and the core ideas behind it - are even feasible?

We'd really appreciate any genuine feedback to help us understand how to make this more useful for other side project owners.