I use Plausible on https://allaboutberlin.com, mainly for privacy and UX reasons (no cookie notice).

It's good, but it doesn't replace Google Analytics at all. It tracks visits and events, but not navigation and user flow. It's severely lacking in detail compared to Analytics. It's a compromise, not a drop-in replacement.

However, it's excellent as a simple tracker for average website admins. I'm very happy with it. The maintainers have been nothing short of stellar with their support and transparency.

I too wanted to preserve privacy and avoid a cookie banner for my blog. I ended up rolling a privacy preserving proxy via Cloudflare workers that forwards `pageview` events to Google Analytics. It's a single HTML tag to drop in and preserves the navigation and user flow reports on the GA side.

See https://github.com/rraval/zeroindexed/tree/master/packages/t...

The blog explains expanded motivation: https://zeroindexed.com/privacy

Cool! Your website looks great. I also live in Berlin! Give Fugu a spin if you want to track conversion funnels (coming soon) and event properties.

Wow, amazing site! Wish I knew about it earlier!

Wow, this is a fantastic site. I definitely plan on visiting Berlin at some point and I'll use it.

I love how clean clear and concise this site is! More sites should be like this! Great work!

I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their site would not log data from my web site at all (their Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically tough shit, and told me to just download their open source version and install it locally.

What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics company.

I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was a bug in their system, not mine.

At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web server configuration really, not in the actually logging Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day, don't call us."

So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care about their customers and product, so I'm looking for alternatives that aren't GA.

That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.

tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute) and therefore if you are using their commercial product you might not be seeing all your visitors.

That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible. I've never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter have always been very friendly and helpful.

Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction with you differently.

Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs? Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.

Why would that user create a PR to help a for-profit company they don't have a good relationship with? Why would anyone what to help a group that disrespected you?

And I would have happily created a PR for their open source version that they generously give away for free, but the bug is in their web server configuration for their hosted product, so they need to put the fix in.

I didn't feel I was being unreasonable asking for free use of their product for a year (after which I would obviously have to pay), for a web app I am writing which currently has practically zero traffic. As bug bounties go, it wasn't a bad deal I thought.

I can't create a PR as the bug is with their server configuration. I don't think there is anything wrong with their code, per se. I think if I installed it locally it would work fine.

It is a real shame. I went to Plausible because they had posted on here, and I'm all for supporting people that show up on HN and seem to be decent human beings. They did not reply to my Tweet to them, I only got support through e-mail, which they weren't that quick about. I'm bummed because the software seemed to be what I wanted, but they've lost my trust now.

Oh I see. Again, I'm sorry that you had this experience. Hopefully they read this and can make it up to you somehow.

Curious - so what was the problem with their server configuration?

What's weird is that your comment here caused some sort of weird bug in HN that I've not seen before (no reply button): https://kingcharles.one/weird-hn-bug.png

@dang - any ideas on this one?

The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.

> The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.

Yeah, no. So far, you only say there's a bug in their server configuration that prevents logging in some cases. I self host plausible and I'd be very much interested in what misconfiguration I could have triggered.

Is it a TCP pool connection problem ? A pre-flight request thing ? Wrong CORS headers ?

On one hand you could be doing FUD, on the other there is a gunfoot problem that could impact self hosters but the knowledge doesn't come out.

I suppose it's a problem that can be pinpoint from the outside, without knowing the proxy stack running at plausible so it should be observable with HTTP sniffer/wireshark.

I think HN somehow limit the pace of answers in fast threads to let people the time to think before they post (so the reply button appears with a bit of delay)

If you really must blow through the delay, click on the timestamp of the post you want to reply to and the reply box will show there.

That's what I did to reply, but I've never seen one person's reply link missing when all the others are visible.

Does Fugu have a free trial period? I would need to test it actually works at all before I start paying for it. Plausible, fortunately, has a free trial on their commercial product, so I could figure out instantly that their system is broken. I would have hated to pay money only to find it had a terminal bug and they wouldn't fix it.

Basically, I'd like a couple of days grace before having to pay for it, so I could install it on my app and see if it even works.

The reason I wouldn't install Fugu locally (or Plausible locally) is that I don't want a whole different deployment channel to support. Likely your code needs a different web server or framework than the rest of my stuff, and that is a lot of setup, installation and support. But I do like that the option exists and that I can see the code.

Yes it does have an infinite free trial period :-) You can track events in test mode without having a subscription. Test mode events are auto-deleted after 14 days. Creating an accounting doesn't require a credit card.

OK. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put that at the very top of your site somewhere. It doesn't say that anywhere that I can see. It just tells me I can self-host for free, or pay $9/month. I clicked off the site because of that, even though the product looked cool.

Let people clearly know they can test drive it for free to see if it works.

EDIT: OK, I see it says that once I click GET STARTED, but that's too late, because I never clicked that button because I didn't want to pay $9 to find out if it worked. You need to make it really clear on the front page.

Also, put a "Sign-up" button next to Sign-In in the top-right corner. That was the first place I looked to try to create an account - I didn't go straight for the GET STARTED button.

Thanks for the feedback! Makes sense, will update it!

I second Plausible but to everyone looking to self-host it, be aware: It’s AGPL licensed! From what I have seen it seems that they only want to discourage direct competitors but an APGL license is an APGL license and that’s a deal breaker for many commercial projects. Older version were licensed under the MIT license iirc so might be an option for some.

Ofc you can always support them and use their cloud hosting solution without any of these problems. I just wish they their pricing was fairer.. Their plans start at 6€ for 10k monthly page views - for that price you could run your own VPS capable of handling literally millions of requests.

Agpl matters if you modify the code, not if you only tun it as a separate service.

IANAL but isn't using the JS snippet a "combined work"?

Is there a way to self host Plausible and avoid the cost?

Is that what your service Fugu aims to achieve?

EDIT: You absolutely can! https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics

Yes, you can self host both, Plausible and Fugu.

This is a really cool thing to work on in your free time! Thanks for sharing. Also, +1 to plausible for simple website analytics.

Thanks :-)

I second Plausible. Have been using it close to a year now. Very happy about it. It is probably not as feature rich as GA, but who needs those features, right. On the other hand they are adding new things everyday, but they focus on what users want.

Analytics solution that support to Mobile platforms(Android, iOS) too? There is Matomo as I know, what else out there? Aggregating things over platform is hassle when using different services for different platforms.

If you use Fugu, it's simple to unify since you track your events by calling the Fugu API. Of course, it takes a bit (not too much) longer to set it up than just slapping a script in there, but it enables you more granular control of what you're tracking.

Why is plausible even a replacement for an analytics app? It's just a counter. What can you analyze using plausible?

User journey, heatmap, filter by users that took several events?