💡 How This Idea Occurred
Google Analytics is bloated (45KB script), privacy-invasive, and requires cookie consent banners that 40% of users reject. Most indie developers and small businesses need simple page view counts and referrer data — not a complex enterprise analytics suite that slows down their site.
🛠 What We Built
Built a sub-1KB tracking script that captures page views, sessions, referrers, and device info without cookies. Server-side session detection via IP hashing (never stored raw). Real-time dashboard with engagement metrics, bounce rates, and geographic data.
- ✓Sub-1KB tracking script (97% smaller than GA)
- ✓No cookies — no GDPR consent banners needed
- ✓Real-time analytics dashboard
- ✓Session and engagement tracking
- ✓One-line script integration — 30 second setup
📚 What We Learned
Evolved from a page view counter to a full privacy-first analytics platform. The challenge is extracting meaningful insights without persistent identifiers — IP hashing with time-windowed sessions (30min) works surprisingly well for 95% of use cases. Discovered that most websites only need 5 metrics: views, uniques, referrers, top pages, and bounce rate. Everything else is vanity.
🚀 SaaS Potential & Future Scope
$20M ARR opportunity competing with Plausible ($2.5M ARR) and Fathom ($5M ARR) at a lower price point. Add funnel analysis, custom events, A/B testing, uptime monitoring, and team dashboards. Target the 200M+ websites that need analytics but hate Google's complexity and privacy invasion. Charge $9/month for up to 100K pageviews. The privacy-first analytics market is growing 40% YoY.