While admirable, a one time payment for a service you host is fair neither to you (what if I use it for 10 years) nor me (what if you shutdown tomorrow).

On the other hand, a one time fee for analytics I could deploy on my server a) makes financial sense for you and b) is an intriguing value proposition for me.

Have a look at https://once.com/

As genuine feedback, you have a long way to go. First of all, plausible can be self hosted and it won't cost you a dime. Secondly, there are atleast 50 analytics services out there that are self hostable and they clearly indicate what features they provide. It is good expect value for your efforts but the other person buying for 49$ also needs to see value. Perhaps add a list of features, some GIFs, screenshots of your analytics tool in action showcasing various parts?

> Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on

You can self-host Plausible yourself if you don't feel like paying $9 a month.

Your excuse for not using plausible is foolish. It's selfhostable. The real excuse would be creating a lightweight version of it because plausible is very much resource intensive. Also the price point doesn't really make sense.

Maybe it's behind the payment link, but I would want to see your company name and registration number and your nominated data controller.

You should also list your data processors, for example your CDN and host.

Hello HN, realized I should introduce myself and not just my project. I building stuff on the web and this is the second time something I created actually goes LIVE.

Before this I created a website displaying snow conditions for a few hundred locations in Sweden. I love skiing and ski-touring and wanted a better way to find the best conditions.

Right now I don't have much time to work on my projects since I'm doing mandatory millitary service, which is part of the reason Simplytics.dev took so long to launch. But I'm hoping I might soon make my first buck selling zeros and ones.

Id love to recieve feedback, Hugo

Regarding the pricing here is what I would do:

- Unlimited and free but basic metrics are public for everyone to see (similar to what Github did before)

- Paid but priced at page view consumption, for example: 12,000 page views a month will be charges 1.20 USD, 140,000 page views a month something like 5.20 USD etc...

This is something I might be willing to subscribe to.

You haven't provided a working link to your service, you said "simplytics.dev" but that doesn't resolve to anything:

    ; <<>> DiG 9.18.18-0ubuntu0.22.04.1-Ubuntu <<>> simplytics.dev
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 60075
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;simplytics.dev.   IN A

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    simplytics.dev.  1760 IN SOA aragorn.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2358025796 10000 2400 604800 1800

    ;; Query time: 7 msec
    ;; SERVER: 1.1.1.1#53(1.1.1.1) (UDP)
    ;; WHEN: Mon Nov 25 16:52:36 CET 2024
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 108

Why are you trying to solve a problem that does not exist ? If you want to self host Plausible - or X, Y, or Z - you can and it’s free.

If you want to create an analytics product and learn by doing it and sell it, that’s fine. But don’t say you did this because the problem was paying for Plausible.

Love the idea of going away from subscriptions. But to be honest, for my business I don't mind paying per month. For software that I use personally, I prefer the lifetime deals.

Also, are you still using IP address?

I would love to check out the website, but it says the site can't be reached. Sounds promising though!

Curiosity: Can you share more about the header you're tracking?

I would be very carefull with saying your are gdpr compliant without having talked to laywer.

Your are basically replacing a unique identifying attribute(ip address) with a unique attribute and a maybe unique attribute, to generate a unique attribute.

The problem is not the ip address, the problem with analytics is that your want to count unique visitors but are not allowed to track any properties of the visitor that are unique and hence a protected property of the visitor per the gdpr.

Congrats for the launch ! How does it compare to Matomo ?

Matomo is a well known open source Analytics alternative, GDPR compliant, used by millions, and it seems to solve the same problem while being freely self-hostable and offering more features. Its cloud version price is more expensive than yours thought.

=> https://matomo.org/

It's unclear to me based on your post, but you do realize that public IPs very much count as personally identifiable information under the GDPR, right?

So this is where the Indie developer trend is right now: open source analytics. I think I have been seeing replica of Plausible every other day. But I am glad the trend as shifted from the AI wrappers.