ukutaht

Yes, very important to understand the corporate structure and legal implications wrt to GDPR and the Schrems II decison.

Plausible Analytics | https://plausible.io | Product Engineer | Remote Worldwide | Full-time

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

For more details, see: https://plausible.io/jobs/product-engineer

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.

1. https://github.com/plausible/hosting

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.

Plausible Analytics | Site Reliability Engineer | Full-time | Remote (global) | €60-100k

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

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.

If you're interested, do check out the full job description here: https://plausible.io/jobs/infrastructure-engineer

[1] https://plausible.io/

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.

1: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/pull/1466

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?

1. https://plausible.io/giving-back 2. https://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/

Disclaimer: Plausible Analytics founder here

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.

1. https://plausible.io/vs-matomo

Thank you!

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.

1. https://github.com/plausible/analytics/pull/1466

Plausible developer here.

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.

We ran a test last summer and found the stats from our JS-based tracker much much much more usable: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

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?

Nice post, Bradley. I think you might be the first one doing A/B testing with Plausible :)

Just a heads up, I think registering a plausible event in the `onclick` handler could introduce a race condition. If the page navigates and unloads before the request to Plausible is sent, you might miss the click in analytics.

The code here is a bit obtuse, but for our Outbound Link tracking feature we set a 150ms delay for navigation [1]. It should give enough time to complete the request to Plausible.

I am planning to tackle this limitation by seeing if we can implement custom event tracking with `navigator.sendBeacon` instead.

1. https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/tracker/s...

Fair enough. BSL is technically not open source but it is endorsed by Bruce Perens of the Open Source Initiative and I believe it is a very good license for new startups in this space.

https://itsfoss.com/making-the-business-source-license-open-...

Sure, our main repository comes with a production-ready Dockerfile: https://github.com/plausible/analytics

We also have a separate repository with examples and code for how to host Plausible Analytics with docker-compose: https://github.com/plausible/hosting

The hosting repo includes everything you need including databases, MaxMind GeoIP database, reverse proxy for SSL, etc.

We don't host with docker-compose ourselves because we want to scale our databases independently from the app server.

I'm not sure I understand your question. Secrets should never be committed to source control, whether the repo is public or not. Being open source does not change how we manage secrets in the slightest.

Does that answer your question?

high five!

Quite a few new players with this model. Off the top of my head:

https://papercups.io/

https://www.getoutline.com/

https://write.as/

https://www.flagsmith.com/

https://posthog.com/

This is how I understand GDPR as well. Just hashing the IP address along with other static values is too easy to reverse and not considered anonymization under GDPR.

For https://plausible.io we added a daily salt to the hash for this exact reason. By deleting the salt at the end of each day, the hash becomes impossible to reverse and visitor data can be considered anonymous.

We lose unique visitor tracking beyond one day, but for most sites this is a small price to pay to remove annoying consent banners.

Thanks for clearing this up. The general data points and metrics we store are not personal data.

IP address is the only piece of data that we touch that is considered PII under some regulations including GDPR.

The IP address is fully anonymized by hashing it together with a daily changing salt. Old salts are deleted to as to prevent re-identification: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/blob/master/lib/plaus...

According to GDPR Recital 26, anonymized data does not fall within the GDPR at all because data is no longer considered “personal data” following anonymization:

The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable.

We'll be adding entry/landing pages report soon :)

Plausible developer here.

We don't show the number sessions/visits at the moment. Most seem happy with the 'unique visitors' number and we don't want to add extra data to the UI unless it's truly useful.

It's possible but not officially supported. You would have to install all the dependencies on your machine and build the mix release yourself.

More accurate would be that we use the site_id in the hash. You can serve your website from many different domains but as long as the site_id in your script tag is the same, the hash remains the same.

The site id is included in the hash to prevent cross-site tracking. Otherwise the hash would act almost like a third-party cookie and people could be tracked across different sites.

Not really keen on the use of the IP address.

Yeah, it's not ideal. We do check the X-Forwarded-For header so as long as the proxies are being good citizens, the client IP is present in that header.

The salt is stored in a Postgres database and we run a daily job that generates a new salt and deletes old ones.

Hey, I use TailwindUI (https://tailwindui.com/components) and a lot of it is custom as well.

Main contributor here. As long as you have Docker installed on the host, you're good to go. If you don't have it, you can install as follows: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/

Absolutely! Sometimes it's hard to balance the open-source aspect with the business side. I'm burning through my savings right now so the focus has been to find paying customers.

At the moment I'm supporting some external contributors who are working on the self-hosted version. If things go well, we should have a first release next month or so.

I'm working on an open-source web analytics tool over at https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible. It's currently bringing in $800/mo and growing pretty fast.

The code is all MIT license and we're working to make it easier to self-host. I make money through providing a hosted version of the product.

It's a similar model to Sentry or Gitlab. Open-source does not have to be libraries and frameworks, there are good opportunities to build more traditional SaaS products that can be self-hosted and you can make money by selling a hosted version.

I understand that not all open-source projects can be funded this way. Once I can pay my own salary, I'm planning to set aside a percentage of revenue to fund open-source projects that Plausible itself relies on.

Their Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

And we also use data about the ads you interact with to help advertisers understand the performance of their ad campaigns. We use a variety of tools to do this, including Google Analytics. When you visit sites that use Google Analytics, Google and a Google Analytics customer may link information about your activity from that site with activity from other sites that use our ad services.

Almost all tech decisions come with a set of tradeoffs. I wouldn't trust articles praising certain technology because they are probably ignoring the tradeoffs that come with it.

Elixir is great for a chat application. At the same time it's probably not the right choice for a Machine Learning project.

Of course there are a number of absolutes that I look for regardless of the context:

* How good is the documentation?

* Is it actively maintained?

* Is it mature?

* etc.