Plausible Analytics is an open source alternative to Google Analytics. Our mission is to reduce corporate surveillance by providing an alternative web analytics tool that doesn’t come from the AdTech world. To learn more, you can check out the live demo of our product and read more about us.
We are looking for a senior product developer who can confidently ship new features and evolve our system architecture at this growth stage. Our team is small (3 devs) and your impact will be big.
We use Elixir/Phoenix, React, PostgreSQL, ClickhouseDB, Terraform/Ansible
Clickhouse has got a lot better in limited memory environments. They now recommend 4GB minimum.
The production environment that crashed due to Clickhouse OOM was our hosted product a while ago :) After that, we haven't had any downtime on our Clickhouse DB for over a year.
The issue with disk space stems from a bad default configuration. Clickhouse used to have EXTREMELY noisy debug level logging enabled by default with no rotation. This has been fixed in our hosting repo[1] so you get sensible defaults.
If you don't want to worry about downtime, planning disk space or compute capacity, then that's exactly what we offer at https://plausible.io. We process and keep the visitor data on our Hetzner servers in Germany.
Plausible founder here. There's nothing automatic but you can track your campaigns with utm_campaigns manually.
Google has made sure that analytics for Google Ads works best within their own walled garden. Same with Facebook and Twitter with their Pixel products.
Instead of using the Referer header or utm parameters as intended, these large corps send obtuse random IDs (gclid, t.co/<id> links) which only they can correlate to an ad, search query or tweet using their internal database.
So until there is anti-trust action in this space towards more oppenness and competition, you're stuck with the ad provider if you want tight integration between ads and analytics.
Hi HN! I'm the technical founder of Plausible Analytics [1], I've been the only full-time developer on the project since the beta in 2018. We are growing steadily and need to start upgrading our infrastructure to keep up with the demand. We're looking for help with:
- Deploying and running our production workloads
- Creating and testing our disaster recovery protocols. From single node failures all the way to whole datacenter failover scenarios
- Defining our monitoring, alerting and incident response practices
- Enabling horizontal scale-out of our application services and database systems
- Automating operational tasks
- etc
It's the most fun project I've ever worked on and I'm not just saying that because I started it. Our product is open source, we have great customers with household names and it feels great to be doing something about the abysmal state of online privacy. We have many self-hosters and get a lot of love and good vibes from the community.
The company is fully bootstrapped and independent from any investors. This means we can grow at a sustainable pace without having to satisfy external growth targets and timelines. We can take time to get things right and ship stuff that we're really proud of.
We are currently just 3 people which means there's little bureaucracy and politics like in larger companies. Things go smooth, you won't be sitting in meetings all day. It's a pure engineering role with ample time and space to actually focus on doing good work. There are pros and cons to how we work but we really enjoy working in a small remote team with tons of autonomy. This is how we plan to keep it.
We're working on GA import at the moment[1], it will be the next big feature we land.
As with everything we will integrate and test with our large customer base on the hosted version and then release it for self-hosted as well. Next release is planned in Q2.
We decided to create a donation fund to support open-source projects that we depend on last year[1]. We rely heavily on PostgreSQL and so just today I was trying to find the best way to contribute to the development of Postgres.
I didn't find much beyond sponsoring official community events[2]. The impression I got was that there are no paid core developers for PostgreSQL, is that correct? If so, what's the best way to support the project financially?
> The impression I got was that there are no paid core developers for PostgreSQL, is that correct?
There are (I and several of my colleagues, for example) - but they're paid by employers having us work on postgres, rather than a foundation or such.
> If so, what's the best way to support the project financially?
There unfortunately - personal opinion, not as a core team member - is no good way to fund a "partial" developer for postgres right now.
On a smaller scale than employing a dedicated postgres developer, regularly testing the in-development release (and reporting bugs!), doing ad-hoc testing, patch review etc are a bit easier to start with.
Did you check the sponsorship page? https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/sponsorship/ For that matter, does the donation page really state that donations are only used for community events? That's not what I see there.
I think Matomo is quite similar to Google Analytics which many people feel is bloated and confusing from the user's perspective. The idea with Plausible is to simplify web analytics and make it more understandable compared to what GA/Matomo offer.
Granted, Matomo does have more depth and features in some areas. It can be the better choice if you want to go very deep into analytics and need some power features that Plausible might not support.
We wrote a little (clearly biased) comparison with Matomo[1]. I hope we're not too harsh on it because Matomo is a great project and still a good fit for many people. But obviously we feel like a modern and simplified take on web analytics fits better for the majority of website owners.
PostHog is more focused on product analytics rather than web analytics. It's a very different product to Plausible so we didn't really do a comparison with them. I would say they're more of an alternative to Mixpanel, Amplitude and those type of products rather than an alternative to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools.
I'm the maintainer of the project and it's so heartwarming to see it being recommended on this forum.
All the projects mentioned here are great. What I think sets Plausible apart is that we've managed to create a profitable business around a 100% AGPL-licensed codebase (i.e. no dual-license for enterprise version). This means we can keep investing into the product and adding new features without being in the 'thankless OSS maintainer' role that so often ends in burnout.
We're currently working on importing historical data from Google Analytics into Plausible[1] which should make switching even easier for many folks. Stay tuned.
I know that it's not a support channel here, but I set up plausible on my blog (rmpr.xyz) was very happy with it, decided to pay for one year. The thing is, when I try to pay, it says my bank refused the transaction (when I pay on other websites like Amazon) it's perfectly fine. And one thing I should note is that I'm charged then refunded a bit later, I don't know if the problem is my bank or your transaction provider. Thank you for such an amazing Product, easy to use and without overhead at all. Kudos to you
hi! we use Paddle for all the payments. i've sent an email to them now to see if they can tell us more. in majority of cases when transactions fails because the bank refuses the transaction they tell us to tell you to contact your bank or to try a different payment method. will get back to you with their response.
Interesting you say that. There's no reason Plausible could not be used like AWStats. Parsing logs is just a different ingestion mechanism and we already provide self-hosting via Docker. On principle it wouldn't be too difficult to drain your logs into a Plausible instance or just run it on the same host along your web server.
So this is why we haven't put too much effort in log analysis. The stats we got from AWStats were mostly bot traffic with no good way to get rid of them.
Have you run AWStats and Plausible side-by-side? Do you not have ~90% bots in your logs?
JS won't ever give you an accurate number (there's a growing army of people blocking JS & trackers). Logs will provide an accurate number, albeit you may not know if it's a 100% human.
