
Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics - jhabdas
https://usefathom.com
======
yoran
For people looking for similar options, there's also Matomo[1] (previously
Piwik) that you can self-host for free.

[1] [https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

~~~
clairity
unfortunately, matomo is harder than necessary to automatically deploy to
containerized environments like heroku because they don't support the 12
factor principles [1]. a cynic might assume that this is because it would
undermine their own hosted solution.

[1] [https://github.com/matomo-
org/matomo/issues/6223](https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/6223)

(i would use matomo if they fixed this issue)

~~~
vorpalhex
Or they just chose a very common pattern of keeping configs in files instead
and haven't gotten around to support environment variables.

Probably not a conspiracy... given that you could fork it, implement this
feature, and then PR it back to the main repo...

~~~
clairity
i looked into it about a year ago, and it would have required a rewrite of the
(brittle) installer as well as supporting modules (that seemed to be
dependencies of other parts of the system), not just extracting the configs
into environment variables (which i did, but that didn't solve the problem).
non-trivial, to say the least.

------
segphault
I really like the idea of a non-intrusive analytics system that just shows you
useful aggregate traffic data while maintaining the privacy of your site's
visitors.

I experimented with using GoAccess
([https://goaccess.io](https://goaccess.io)) on CloudFront logs instead of
using Google Analytics. It gave me a lot of what I needed, without the
overhead or intrusiveness of client-side code—and it provided a more complete
view of my traffic because it isn't stymied by browser plugins that block
tracking.

The downside was having to save the logs, periodically run it to generate
reports, etc. It's not a lot of work, but it's more work than GA. I think CDN
providers should just include managed analytics tools of this caliber as
either part of the package or for a modest extra fee.

------
ryrobes
> web services do crappy things with that data. (Hey Zuck, how was Congress?)

Is this kind of snark really necessary in top marketing copy? I get what you
are saying in terms of freemiums ins and outs, but I don't know if it should
be my first impression to your company's message.

To each their own, just feels a bit cheap IMHO.

~~~
pauljarvis
author of that line here: i don't want to live in a world where companies
can't have a little fun with some copy.

~~~
sho
I suspected that most or all of HN basically agrees with your attitude vis-à-
vis Facebook and data collection, including your critics here, but that's not
the point. The point is that games have Rules, and when you break those Rules,
it causes others to wonder where else you might be breaking them. This erodes
trust very quickly.

Rules are made up by a consensus of the players. You've just been told by 3
people, 4 including me, that you broke the Rules. This means you broke them.

A landing page for a company is like a job interview. Certain things are
expected. First impressions matter and you're on your best behaviour. Sure,
you can wear bunny slippers to the interview and then complain that you don't
want to work for that company anyway if you can't have some fun. But who's out
of a job?

A little bit quirky might be OK - snarky is definitely not. I recommend
changing your copy immediately, and reflecting on how better to gracefully
accept constructive criticism from what should be your ideal target market in
future.

~~~
pauljarvis
fair enough, i'll update the copy now.

------
dvko
Hey, author here (one of 2).

Whoa, I did not expect to see Fathom show up on Hacker News. It's very early
but our plan is indeed to go down a similar road as Matomo, albeit more
opinionated. Hopefully resulting in a simpler product in the long run.

I feel it's important to point out out that with Fathom, no personal
information is tracked (or stored), at all. Only daily and hourly aggregates
are stored on the server.

And yes, the demo should not require you to enter credentials. The simple
reason is that I haven't gotten to polishing that experience just yet. Sorry.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I love where you are going with this, I think this would be useful for a lot
of people in marketing where Google Analytics is too much.

But are you concerned that GA will come out with an "overview panel" for
dummies, that cuts into your appeal? Or do you have a plan to stay ahead if GA
comes out with a view like this?

~~~
dvko
Thanks! We're not too concerned about that too be honest, we'll still be open-
source with the ability to self-host after all. Something that Google
Analytics will never offer.

Given the current state of Google Analytics, staying ahead in terms of
simplicity shouldn't be an issue for a long, long time.

------
mwexler
Or use the original self-hosted-at-scale open source solution, Snowplow
([https://snowplowanalytics.com/](https://snowplowanalytics.com/)). These guys
have been solving self-hosted digital analytics for years now, and have
consistently proven to be one of the best options for real-time digital data
tracking, triggering, and analytics. Their qa/schema focus is especially nice
in teams where multiple people are contributing data but you want to make sure
that minimum data quality requirements are conformed to.

~~~
tmikaeld
The only install instructions i could find, where to run a vagrant VM.

Would like to know how to deploy for production.

------
alexcabrera
Reminds me of Guag.es [https://get.gaug.es/](https://get.gaug.es/) or
[https://haveamint.com/](https://haveamint.com/) if you want to dig into the
crates a bit.

~~~
dewey
I was actually just looking into gauges and Fathom yesterday and tried to set
it up. Fathom seemed a bit too early stage to run it myself so I'm going to
wait a bit.

I was pleasantly surprised that when I looked into gauges that the interface
looks modern (unlike the screenshots on the start page) so it seems that it
changed hands and is actively being developed again. I used it a while ago
when it was bought up by Github.

------
vanderZwan
Out of curiosity, and as someone who has never used website analytics: why do
we need a third party for this? Couldn't a bit of client side code + server
side code do all the work these days?

~~~
fmajid
You can self-host Fathom, I do.

It's very basic compared to Piwik, but it runs on PostgreSQL, my DB of choice,
and it's written in Go, not PHP, which means it has higher performance and is
more secure.

~~~
dvko
Hey, good to see you already running Fathom!

Just wanted to add that you can also use Fathom with MySQL or SQLite if that's
more your cup of tea. It supports those 3 database engines right now.

~~~
jazoom
Does it work with CockroachDB? It aims for compatibility with Postgres but
there are some differences so some projects aren't compatible.

------
Uw7yTcf36gTc
This doesn't come even close to the type of data you can get from Google
Analytics. It's nice as a free/open source service, but the power just isn't
there. Even piwik/matomo is vastly inferior to what kind of data you can track
and visualize in Google Analytics.

~~~
_4leaf_
This is the issue I've found with every open source product. I'm perfectly
happy to pay for an analytics product, so the best I've been able to find is
adobe Omniture. Unfortunately that's a 30 - 100k price tag. There is
definitely a market for a powerful analytics platform at a reasonable price.

~~~
michaelmior
Since it sounds like you've tried a good number of options, what do you think
about Mixpanel? We used it at the startup I used to work at and I mostly
enjoyed it although we didn't go to deep.

~~~
iampims
mixpanel is neat but gets very expensive very quickly.

------
eli
> _" [Google Analytics is] assembling data profiles on your website visitors,
> which they can then use for better targeting of advertisements across their
> network."_

I'm pretty sure this is misleading/false. I don't think Google uses Analytics
data from your site to target AdWords on other sites.

Maybe it's true in a general sense that GA gives them lots of aggregate data
which they can use to make smarter business decisions about other products
including ads. But it is a myth that Google Analytics data feeds directly into
any Google ad-targeting platform.

I think the main thing Google gets out of free-tier Analytics is it encourages
small webmasters to pay attention to their traffic and makes it easy to
demonstrate the value of buying ads from Google.

~~~
nerdponx
This may have been true at one point, but I don't think it's true anymore.

[https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html](https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html)

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245)

[https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-
sites](https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites)

Interesting aside: Google Analytics customers are required to prominently
state that their site uses Google Analytics. I suspect many, if not most,
customers don't do this.

~~~
eli
It's admittedly confusing, but I think I'm still right and that you may be
conflating policies about other google services. From your second link, which
is specific to Analytics, it says:

> _What is the data used for?_

> _Google uses Google Analytics data to provide the Google Analytics
> measurement service to customers. Identifiers such as cookies and app
> instance IDs are used to measure user interactions with a customer’s sites
> and /or apps, while IP addresses are used to provide and protect the
> security of the service, and to give the customer a sense of where in the
> world their users come from._

I'm pretty sure GA data doesn't intermingle with AdWords targeting profiles in
a default configuration.

~~~
reaperducer
_I 'm pretty sure GA data doesn't intermingle with AdWords targeting profiles
in a default configuration._

If that was true, then Google wouldn't consider it a violation of its ToS for
HIPAA-covered entities to use its analytics product.

"If you are (or become) a Covered Entity or Business Associate under HIPAA,
you may not use Google Analytics for any purpose or in any manner involving
Protected Health Information unless you have received prior written consent to
such use from Google."

Source:
[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en)

~~~
eli
I don't see how one thing follows from the other. GA is obviously not intended
for storing Protected Health Information.

------
StavrosK
I think I tried this a month or so ago. It looked great, except for the one
fatal flaw that stopped me from actually deploying it: It doesn't support
multiple sites per installation, and I don't want to have to deploy one server
per site.

~~~
shiloa
[https://oribi.io](https://oribi.io) does that and more.

Disclaimer - it's neither self hosted nor free (nor very expensive), and I was
previously a part of the team that built it. I can honestly say no data is
being sold to 3rd parties, as should be expected from a paid service.

------
tomovo
If this works as advertised I just found my new favorite piece of software.
Matomo is nice but way too complicated for my needs, and, as someone
mentioned, adding a log analyzer can be a bit troublesome. This looks perfect!

------
codingdave
No complaints about the little I can see of the service here, and the point of
protecting the privacy of our users is well-taken.

But at the same time, stats packages have been available for year simply by
parsing your server logs (awstats, etc). Old solutions still work, even if the
problem space is evolving in new directions.

~~~
Theodores
Haven't touched awstats for the best part of a decade. What is the new shiny
on these server log tools?

Why is it that not one SEO organisation/company/snake-oil salesperson ever
thinks to look at the server logs? One problem that Progressive Web App/server
worker solves is catching those messages that don't get sent to Google
Analytics and making sure they are sent. You would think that server stats
offer a level of truthiness that SEO types would be interested in.

In theory you could do backend tracking, e.g. default server logs and not run
cookies on the frontend until the site visitor does something requiring state,
e.g. adding to cart. Then you could throw up the 'cookie notice' and aggregate
their previous page visits to get the data needed to see where the sales
funnel is working, even de-anonymising it so you know more about a given
customer and their browsing habits.

~~~
stevekemp
> Why is it that not one SEO organisation/company/snake-oil salesperson ever
> thinks to look at the server logs?

When you're hosted on S3, etc, you don't get access to the logs.

For larger sites which are hosted across a number of webservers, behind a
load-balancer, getting a unified access-log is also a little fiddly.

But I guess the honest answer is that it's not trendy enough these days. With
Javascript submission of "stuff" you get much more data about your visitors
than you can glean from the server-side logs.

~~~
jessaustin
[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.h...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.html)

------
conductr
> Want to see a demo of Fathom? View our live stats here (user: demo@demo.com,
> password: demo)

This is UX feedback from a lazy user. Why make me type in a login and
password? Especially one that I have to remember from the previous screen?

It's trivial effort to just setup an auto login based on some query string
parameter right? As in, url?demo=true results in either populating the
login/password fields so all I have to do is hit the button, but then it's
also trivial effort to just add in some JS that triggers the button for me,
thus auto login.

~~~
traskjd
I always struggle with this type of response on UX issues. They always seem to
think the 'how' is important, and that the length of time that takes is also
important.

It's not.

You don't need to explain how to do it, you don't need to make an argument on
time to implement - unless the time to implement is insanely high.

Use the language of business: You are losing prospects by creating work for
them. Resolving this will help your sales funnel. Over time this could be
worth substantial revenue, and contribute to the ultimate survival of your
product. That is worth a lot more than how long it takes to implement or how
to do it.

~~~
conductr
I've found in most (all?) aspects of my life, trying to tell other people how
to deliver feedback is usually the wrong approach. The better thing is to take
the feedback regardless of how it's delivered and learn to interpret. Things
are implied. Feedback on A, may actually be point at a problem with Z.
Sometimes the correct way to interpret is to discard. The source of feedback
is not going to connect those dots for you.

That said, I see your point but I will try to defend mine. Your language of
business sentence is basically implied by the pure existence of my complaint
right? Should I have to type every implication out in order to provide any
feedback? And this being a tech place for tech people I wanted to emphasize
how simple it would be to correct (I don't really even know if the creator/app
owner is reading, so it's more of a general feedback for other people who
build products.) Highly subjective either way. Hell, the app owner could argue
they don't care about people that don't manually type in the info because
they're not really potential customers. I don't know if I'd fully agree, but
it could be a form of lead qualification in which your business language
feedback would not hold weight. It's at least somewhat true, because I was
just curiously kicking the tires. I have no use for this product.

~~~
traskjd
Apologies it was directed, I did mean it more as a generalization and it
didn't come across that way sorry. Off for the morning coffee now :)

~~~
conductr
No worries, feedback is such a highly subjective topic

------
akerl_
I clicked through the linked page, and it's not clear to me how to actually
add analytics to my site? The instructions in the repo direct me to launch a
golang daemon for what appears to be the dashboard.

It would be awesome to have a more cohesive example. Is this reading log
files? Or using client-side JS? If the latter, do I have to have the Fathom
server internet-facing so that the JS can report in?

------
JimWestergren
My own Redistats [0] is not open source but a good alternative and has a good
privacy policy [1]. It is the only stat tracker I use for my sites.

[0] [https://redistats.com/](https://redistats.com/) [1]
[https://redistats.com/privacy-policy](https://redistats.com/privacy-policy)

~~~
ainiriand
So freepdfs.org is 404 at the moment.

~~~
JimWestergren
Thanks, explains the dip in traffic of the home page.

------
thecosas
#Bug report Data doesn't include selected end date.

[STRs] In top right, select 7/8 as start date and 7/10 as end date.

[Expected] Displays data for 7/8, 7/9, and 7/10.

[Actual] Displays data for 7/8 and 7/9 only.

~~~
LukeBMM
Just a wild guess, but it's probably filtering from 2018-07-08T00:00:00 to
2018-07-10T00:00:00 (instead of ending at 2018-07-10T23:59:59).

~~~
thecosas
I'm guessing the same, but it's still not expected behavior.

------
undefined0
In a future release, I highly recommend keeping the simplicity by allowing
people to browse the basic stats page without requiring JavaScript. Other than
that, it is a great project.

~~~
dvko
Thanks!

Can you elaborate a little bit on the use-cases where this would apply? I can
get into the idea that tracking would ideally not rely on JavaScript, but the
dashboard? Surely the administrator can enable JavaScript for their Fathom
dashboard, right?

~~~
undefined0
For security reasons, we keep JavaScript disabled even when browsing our own
websites (which are ran on remote servers). If it was locally developed, it
wouldn't be a problem to have JavaScript enabled.

Also, as a side effect, it's considerably faster browsing the internet without
JavaScript enabled.

------
lgregg
This gives me an appreciation for the "lurkers" on HN. This post has 109
points and 53 comments, right now, and on their stats demo it shows 2,770
unique views from hacker news.

~~~
duxup
Fair or not I kinda want to blame the lurkers every time I see a post
skyrocket quickly that has a flashy title but the content is bad and all the
comments point out how bad it is....

Yay lurkers!

Boo lurkers!

------
bonsai80
Nice to see another system available for this. The only other I knew of was
Piwik (which now I see is Matomo).

------
lcnmrn
Why not use GoAccess and a cron job? That works for me even when the client
has ad/script blockers.

~~~
joshyi
I second that. It works for me as well even when the client has ad/script
blockers.

------
andrewfromx
Well my first thought was, wait, what if this is a trojan horse? Like, what if
a big evil tech giant was behind this and this started all 100% ok but it
was/is a trap? And even if it’s not a current evil tech giant behind this,
what if fathom becomes google over time?

~~~
driverdan
It's open source. You can review the code.

------
flomm
Looks interesting, will try it out.

Is there a roadmap or planned features page for fathom?

~~~
dvko
Hey, not yet but we're planning on setting up a public roadmap on Trello, like
how JSFiddle does it.

[1] [https://trello.com/b/LakLkQBW/jsfiddle-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/LakLkQBW/jsfiddle-roadmap)

------
jhabdas
Shocker how may of you don't have DNT enabled. >:]

~~~
ionised
Does it even make a difference anymore?

~~~
jhabdas
I suppose that depends on us.

------
rammy1234
is this trustworthy ? how it is free and does not collect user information. so
what it gets for providing us this service for free ?

~~~
urtrs
It is self hosted

~~~
rammy1234
how is it able to handle cost of self-hostin cost ?

~~~
lccarrasco
It means that you can install it in your own server, be it physical,
colocated, rented or anything else. So you're the one paying for the
infrastructure but you're also in control of your data.

------
Dowwie
No mention here about snow plow?

------
dmix
> The problem is this: if we aren’t paying for the product, we are the
> product.

This quote keeps living on endlessly. It's based on a naive and terribly over-
simplified view of the internet, 'free' products, and capitalism in general.
TLDR: Consumers _aren 't_ the product if the product would not exist without
customers, and customers wouldn't be on the product unless it provides them
value.

Not to mention publisher web analytics, such as this, are rarely being used to
target ads. That is a completely different .js file (still) being embedded
alongside the analytics.

I'm all for privacy but it's important to be accurate about this stuff. No
major newspaper or free site is going to stop 'making their visitors the
product' by switching to a privacy-first web analytics product. FB has
accomplished equally as much as Google Analytics without providing any
analytics service.

~~~
Illniyar
I don't think it's naive or oversimplified. If you don't pay for the product,
then someone is paying for the product - either it's taking a loss (venture
capital burn, self hosting), another person is paying for it (donations,
freemiums) or your data is being used for profit.

If your data is used for profit, you and your data is what the company sells
to other people. By definition you are the product.

Whether that's a bad thing depends on your view, but to me it means the
product I use is skewed towards the needs of the people who pay, which often
have demands that aren' in my best interest.

~~~
Karunamon
> _If your data is used for profit, you and your data is what the company
> sells to other people. By definition you are the product._

The reason this is naive and oversimplified is that, say, Google, _does not
sell your data_. Your data is their competitive advantage and they have every
reason to not sell it. There is no service Google provides where someone can
go in and request your data or access it.

Advertisers are generally not buying _you_ , or _your data_ , they are buying
_access to your attention_ based on the data a third party has about you, but
not the data itself.

Selling your information is a different business model (think insurance,
credit reports, LexisNexis and so on) and is usually not what's under
discussion when this thought-terminating cliché gets used.

~~~
reaperducer
_does not sell your data_

Depends on how you define _sell_.

Advertisers pay to use the Google's collected data about people in order to
better target their ads. This happens through Google's advertising channels
(Doubleclick, AdWords, etc...)

Money changes hands. Personal data is involved. Sounds like selling to me.

Perhaps you should say "Google does not directly sell copies of your data,"
instead. But there is indeed a transaction involving personal data.

~~~
Karunamon
It's still a dishonest and reductive thought-terminating cliche, because it
intentionally misrepresents the nature of the transaction.

Your data never leaves Google, nor can third parties acces it. Google is not
selling your data. QED.

