
Make your website a black hole to big tech - JackWritesCode
https://usefathom.com/news/blackhole
======
nesyt
This is just an advertisement for the company. It doesn't really say anything
substantive. "Google bad, we better!"

~~~
JackWritesCode
It's most certainly a plug for privacy-focused products. We're as surprised as
you that this ended up on the front page.

~~~
FisDugthop
But you submitted it. You ought to know that submitting an article can cause
it to appear on the front page. You also ought to know better than to submit
advertisements, yet you did it anyway.

~~~
JackWritesCode
It's got an upsell in it but it's not an advert.

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ibudiallo
Most people I know with small websites will not pay $15/month for analytics.
The privacy part of it is also not really the concern of small website owners.

This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with
server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik).

I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest
replacement I could find. But again, small website owners don't pay for
analytics. When anything I write generates even modest traffic, Matomo
crashed. Adding a more robust server would help, and they have documentation
for optimization. But hey it's just my personal blog.

If you are looking to add robust analytics, GA is the no-brainer. If you are
willing to pay and respect privacy, use Matomo and have your devops optimize
it for you.

~~~
Porthos9K
I have a couple of small websites. Rather than inflict Google Analytics on my
occasional visitors or pay for this, I just do without.

Besides, I think the only stance that genuinely respects the user's rights is
the one that says _no data should be collected, ever_.

~~~
JackWritesCode
We collect total page views, total uniques, browsers, countries, device types
and goal hits in aggregate.

Privacy started becoming more important when we started seeing the gross
tactics companies used to identify you & link all of your actions / history to
you. Fathom doesn't do this and never will.

~~~
Porthos9K
Can't that information be gathered from http server logs?

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hmhrex
I've been using Fathom for about a little over a month now and I love it. I
researched the privacy-focused analytics products out there and it came out on
top: [https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-
focu...](https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focused-
analytics-platforms-209m)

------
alanfranz
This is interesting... but I have a personal website, I won't pay ~$150/year
for this service (my whole box is about $200/year).

Is there any free alternative to google analytics, including self-hosted
approaches?

~~~
sdan
I'm building one that's both cheaper (mostly free but at most $2 a month) and
faster than Fathom. I'm onboarding some customers but I'm planning to launch
in January!

[http://sdan.io/pingpong](http://sdan.io/pingpong)

If you want to stay updated, fill out this form:
[https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8](https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8) and
I'll keep in touch soon.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Good luck. Building a sustainable business at $2 / month will be hard but we
wish you the best :)

~~~
sdan
Given that I'm targeting the developer community, I understand that paying for
stuff like this is a huge turn off (at least that's one of the main reasons
I'm building this). In the long term I think I'll try making this more
sustainable by selling to businesses (which in my mind and from what I heard
makes more sense).

Anyways, thanks!

------
Hoasi
I have not used Google Analytics in years. There are so many extraordinary
features that I ended up wasting too much time with it without any substantial
gain. Now you'd have to pay me to use it. For small sites, it is overkill.

~~~
sdan
It definitely is. As someone who just made some simple HTML sites on Github
Pages, I just want some simple analytics without having to pay much.

That's why, I'm building [https://sdan.io/pingpong](https://sdan.io/pingpong),
which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in
January.

It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.

If you want to stay updated, fill out this form:
[https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8](https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8) and
I'll keep in touch soon.

~~~
thinkxl
> it is overkill.

> It definitely is.

It is not, you pay $14 and you get basic analytics and this
[https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization](https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization)
that's worth the money for me.

> It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.

What about user privacy? are you anonymizing the users?

~~~
sdan
As a student (and a developer) I see paying $14 a month a huge expense. To
really promote the privacy and accessibility for all, I'm building this to
make it free and will absorb the compute costs if I have to for the sake of
value for customers.

Finally, yes, I'm planning to utilize a variety of shuffling and hashing
techniques to anonymize users, data, and all other aspects. At the moment, I'm
focusing on getting under 90ms on average globally (which I have achieved,
just not implemented into the master branch yet)... which is over 4.5x faster
than Fathom's average of 420ms globally. More coming soon! Fill out if
interested:
[https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8](https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8).

~~~
pauljarvis
Your stats are wholly incomplete compared to Fathom, lack any kind of GUI,
graphs, or date-based filters. I think the comparison in speed is like
comparing an apple to an elephant :)

~~~
sdan
Yeah I'm lacking a ton of stuff. No GUI, nothing in fact. But the tracker I've
implemented (not into prod yet) does get under 90ms globally.

Your service, which I've seen is serverless, is actually pretty fast compared
to other services and for that I have to admire your work. However, as I've
done some response time testing on Postman
([https://twitter.com/notsuryad/status/1199201916850278400?s=2...](https://twitter.com/notsuryad/status/1199201916850278400?s=20))
I've found that my service is getting right next to Google Analytics' response
times.

I'll release more details about how I've conducted this soon, but I hope the
best for Fathom (I've used Fathom self hosted before but ran into some
issues).

------
martokus
I don't get this. Small personal website are not going to pay money. Business
websites in general will not leave GA and not because of the analytical aspect
but because of the integrations. Businesses use Google Ads, GA ties in closely
with Ads. Then you connect to Data Studio for your dashboards. And deploy
through GTM. It's a whole eco system that's hard to replace by a single piece
of software. As much as I'd love to stick it to Google as a person responsible
for a business site I can't afford it.

~~~
pauljarvis
Not all businesses use ads or data studio though. Those folks are looking for
quick and easy stats they can use to run their business, like what content is
popular, what referrals are driving traffic. And, if they're a business, they
are making money, and at least some can afford to pay for expenses like
website analytics. Like all software, it's not for everyone in every
situation, but it is for certain folks in certain situations.

------
xp84
Fathom "Doesn't use cookies" \- so how does it have any concept of things like
sessions and unique users then? I really want to know. The website doesn't
explain this, it just drops that line and walks away. This is like saying a
car "doesn't need tires" \- sounds interesting, but wtf does that mean?

I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's
pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the
same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.'

I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id
as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks
- though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS.

Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty
flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just
appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern.

(of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the
idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would
probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil
and scary).

------
colechristensen
Is there any analytics kind of product that just pulls information from web
server access logs?

There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested
in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to
do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it
myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)

~~~
senko
GoAccess ([https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)) looks interesting,
though I haven't had the chance to play with it yet.

~~~
thinkxl
Related "Show HN: I replaced Google Analytics with simple log-based
analytics"[1]

\- [1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876)

------
DrOctagon
Happy (recent) Fathom customer. I use it on a handful of small side projects.

I hope there is space in the market for a product like this. I did a
reasonable amount of research and the $14/month is worth it for the handful of
side projects I use it on.

Their marketing can be a little earnest, but for me the product strikes the
right balance between the info provided, privacy, and cost.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Appreciate the honest review :)

------
lance76
I still don’t understand why small website owners don’t just use their server
logs.

They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being
inactive.

The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to
CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are
ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular
but the rest seem similar.

Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so
you lose cool 5-year growth stats.

I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On
our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we
sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else.

Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.

------
hn_throwaway_99
If I don't use Google Analytics on my website, but 70% of my visitors visit
using Chrome, Google knows what's going on regardless.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Scary thoughts. More people are moving to Brave, which is great.

~~~
pauljarvis
Nah, #Firefox4life ;)

~~~
JackWritesCode
Hell yah to that too!

------
sveingjoby
I can't imagine to pay $14/m for my personal website

~~~
sdan
I can't either. As someone who just wants simple, private, and cheap
analytics, I wanted a product that could do so (all current products are
pretty expensive).

That's why, I'm building [https://sdan.io/pingpong](https://sdan.io/pingpong),
which should be free up to 100k visitors monthly and am expecting to launch in
January.

It's cheaper, faster (by a 3-4x margin), and simple.

If you want to stay updated, fill out this form:
[https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8](https://forms.gle/BZA7thD878PbKnSs8) and
I'll keep in touch soon.

------
saadalem
You should have a more killer product than google analytics to have people pay
for it ! People don't care about privacy at the point they talk ;)

~~~
thinkxl
A "killer" product isn't for everybody. Not everyone needs all the options
that Google Analytics offer, plus there are some people concerned about
privacy, and products like Fathom and Simple Analytics are perfect for them.

------
notacoward
The title is misleading. This isn't about Big Tech. It's about _Google
specifically_. Why not name them?

~~~
JackWritesCode
It applies to big tech.

1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal)
2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches)
etc.

~~~
notacoward
Yes, those things happened, but they're not relevant to _this advertorial_
which is very clearly about Google Analytics. Facebook doesn't run Google
Analytics. Yahoo doesn't run Google Analytics. Google does. It's just oh-so-
convenient how people always name-and-shame every other company, but when
Google is the culprit it's "big tech" in general.

~~~
JackWritesCode
Fair enough, point taken. We could've named Google in the title.

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pteredactyl
Piwik.

