I run fathom self hosted. I don’t love it and am looking for an alternative. But this is because they don’t update the self hosted version.

I get it that I’m asking for a free service, I just kind of wish they never offered it if they were going to ditch it. I don’t make money off my sites. I wish they had a less than X income version to self host. Oh well.

If you are making money and willing to pay I have a feeling Fathom is great.

You can check out https://usertrack.net, but it's currently $99/life. I do plan to add a free version with some limited features (no heatmaps, no session recordings, no multi-domain, etc.), but the free version should be anyway better than most of the alternatives (fast interface, segments, quick user filtering, easy to install).

If you want, you can contact me on Twitter to tell me what the free version should contain for you to consider using it, or if the current price for the lifetime version is too high for you.

Fathom started out with much fanfare as being Open Source, but as soon as their paid service gained enough traction they went proprietary only.

Can't recommend a company which pulls crap like that. :(

Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time.

Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools:

Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/

Table Plus is about 3 years old, SQLite is 6 years old. I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. Everyone talks about it and they innovate fast. They work full time on it too, $59 a license. They are so active, and have so many great features. Full time salaries help with that. SQLite has $102 in Patreon support. Table Plus makes that in 2 sales.

Look at Sequel Pro. One of the best products in the game but it never built a sustainable business model and it wasn't economically viable to continue, and look at it now.

I'm happy to say that we're achieving our goal every day. Our goal is to build a sustainable, profitable business (profitable businesses don't typically close down) that we can we can work full time on every day, moving people away from Google Analytics. For every 1 negative comment we get, hundreds / thousands of people signing up for Fathom.

We've spoken about it here too: https://usefathom.com/podcast/opensource

> For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue ...

Who gives a crap? You guys started out as OSS and said it would continue to be. That turned out to be bullcrap, just looking for exposure.

> I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular.

sigh Table Plus supports many different types of database. If people are looking for a macOS specific solution that does that, Table Plus might be a decent choice.

"SQLite Browser" on the other hand is specific to a single database. Though is cross platform and fairly popular in it's niche.

That being said, where are you getting "more popular" for Table Plus from though? Measured by what things?

> SQLite is 6 years old

Huh?

> SQLite has $102 in Patreon support.

You seem to be meaning DB Browser for SQLite.

Do we seem like a commercial project to you?

We recently added a Patreon link to our download page, after forgetting to put it out there much. The Patreon was originally created to cover our server costs (about US$75/mo from memory) some years ago, a goal we reached in 3 days.

That being said, we're trying out various things for a SaaS model as well because - like yourselves - we recognise success there will help with sustainability.

But we're sure as hell not going to bait and switch anyone.

> Look at Sequel Pro. ... and look at it now.

Seems like a commercial product whose organisation went broke, released the software as OSS, and couldn't get traction for that either?

People do appear to have picked up the project again recently, in an attempt to move it forwards:

https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro/issues/3679#issuecomm...

> Our goal is to...

Sure. You guys started out by bullshitting people. Unfortunately, the lack of integrity doesn't seem to be directly hurting. :(

One can hope it'll mean missed important opportunities for yourselves later, but who knows. You seem to be really leaning into the sales thing here on HN though.

> We've spoken about it here too ...

With an established history of lying, who cares?

We are 2 indie developers trying to build a sustainable business. We are trying to compete against Google. The idea that the open-source package is responsible for our success is ludicrous. Our success came from thousands of hours of work. You’ll believe the narrative you choose. You’re entitled to that. We will always be “liars” to you because we chose to spend our time building up the paid service. You feel like we should open source all of our code, that’s fine. This conversation isn’t productive, and you seem spiteful, so I’m retiring. And I hadn’t realized that you were the creator of DB browser, that was just a recent example I’d been discussing with friends. Good luck with your chosen path. Please hug your family and take some time to relax.

I think the biggest peeve people have isn't so much that Fathom v2/PRO is closed source, but rather the "we'll open source it soon" kind of "dangling the carrot" stuff.

In the GitHub issue you mentioned "since people are confused [..]", but people are confused because your communication has quite frankly not been very good. Even today just looking at the Fathom README it's not at all clear that Fathom v2 (or "PRO") is an entirely different codebase/product which merely shares the name and branding, and not much else, and it's not clear that the "Lite" version is essentially unmaintained either.

We're going to make our stance clear with our next release of Lite. We definitely made some mistakes with regards to V2. Originally we had planned to open-source it, but then we decided against it.

I'm still trying to understand why your current "production" (eg SaaS) version of Fathom can't also be FOSS.

Other places (eg Redash) do so, and are doing extremely well.

The change from FOSS to non-FOSS, especially throwing away the goodwill you'd started out with... makes no sense. :(

Popularity of DB Browser for SQLite wise, you might want to check our stats page:

https://sqlitebrowser.org/stats/

We're doing decently well, and our GitHub organisation has more active developers now than ever before. :)

Note that Fanthom had a change of ownership, and that the original author doesn't seem entirely happy with the change of direction either.

Ahhh. I thought the original owner sold the project, but didn't realise they didn't have further involvement.

Is that info about the original author being unhappy somewhere public?

> No tracking

Personally, I think that Fathom strikes a good balance between privacy and usability, but it does still use tracking (or at least it did when I was looking at it a few weeks back) - the difference is that it uses fingerprinting instead of cookies. I think it's implemented in a privacy-focused way, but it does look like they are ignoring some of the EU ePrivacy guidance, which explicitly states that consent should be obtained before using fingerprinting, even if PII can't be reverse-engineered from the fingerprint.

As I say, I think their implementation makes a lot of sense, and even as a privacy advocate myself I think those particular pieces of ePrivacy guidance focused on fingerprinting is excessive. But the EU doesn't seem to agree.

We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey area when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's guidance, it talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our technology isn't cookie-like. And our processing isn't cookie-like either. We've had lawyers look at our documentation and all of them have said it's a grey area.

You'll know this but some people reading might not: Under GDPR, there are multiple legal bases for processing and we rely on legitimate interest. PECR / ePrivacy is the grey area for us and other services.

Having said all of this, we're fortunately moving away from requiring any compliance at all... by avoiding the complexities all together. We're rolling a refactor to our data collector over the next few weeks, and we won't have to have these conversations about grey areas anymore :) We've hired a top-tier privacy consultant and are going to be deploying a huge update, putting us at the top of the list for compliant analytics. Every single privacy-focused analytics service is in a grey area right now (some think they're not but they are). We will be the first to move out of this GDPR / ePrivacy grey area dance.

As you say, you see the logic behind the implementation we had, but we're dealing with politicians who don't understand the difference between Google Analytics and privacy-focused analytics. And that's fine, the work they've done has lead to better privacy for everyone, so we appreciate them.

> We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey area when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's guidance, it talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our technology isn't cookie-like. And our processing isn't cookie-like either. We've had lawyers look at our documentation and all of them have said it's a grey area.

That sounds like you are trying to pick and choose the bits you want to hear :)

There have been several ammendments since the original ePrivacy guidance. There is at least one such directive that is very explicit about fingerprinting specifically. If doesn't use ambiguous language, it states clearly that consent is required for fingerprinting.

As I said, I personally think it's just bonkers, and I think your service is absolutely in the spirit of the ePrivacy rules. But you can't say the rules on fingerprinting are not clear.

I'm keen to see what you've got coming, as the only way I see to avoid consent is not to associate identifiers with users at all - so each page hit would be a completely independent object. Can you say anything about your plans here?

Like I say, we've had lawyers review our docs. Even the term "fingerprinting" has more nuance to it. Fingerprinting is used as a way to attempt to set a permanent cookie / identify an individual, and their actions. We don't do this.

And we definitely agree that it's bonkers.

I can't say anything here until we've got our press release out.

> Like I say, we've had lawyers review our docs. Even the term "fingerprinting" has more nuance to it. Fingerprinting is used as a way to attempt to set a permanent cookie / identify an individual, and their actions. We don't do this.

Ouch, I kind of wish you hadn't said that, because it sounds like you're straying dangerously close into weasel words and deliberately incorrectly interpretations. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but what I've read is very clear.

As before I like your solution, and I think it's absolutely in the spirit of privacy. But the guidance is really clear here, and gives examples of fingerprinting. Nobody said a fingerprint has to be a permanent identifier; as far as I recall, Fathom does use fingerprinting to identify individuals, so that a sequence of page views can be attributed to a single visitor. I understand that those fingerprints include a timestamp, and so are only valid for some time (2 hours, or whatever it is).

Thanks for your input here, Gordon. It doesn't sound harsh at all, you clearly care about privacy regulations and you're trying to help. Ultimately, we had moved based on conversations with lawyers. But as I say, we are rolling out changes this week & next, so it doesn't matter what we think about the regulation :) And thanks again for the challenge.

Thanks for the debate, and I'll be looking out for what you've got coming next!

My company switched to Fathom from GA about 4 days ago.

We build privacy software so it felt slightly hypocritical to use a privacy-intrusive service like GA. So far so good.

I went from 0 to Fathom in under 20 mins and for our basic requirements it works really well .

Good job Fathom team :)

Thanks so much, glad you had such a good experience :)

When I try to view your demo page I get 'Secure Connection Failed' every time. Firefox 77.0.1 on Windows 10.

Strange. Fully valid certificate. Try hard refreshing a few times.

Still no luck, this is the URL https://app.usefathom.com/share/lsqyv/pjrvs. Did not load in Chrome either.

So strange. I've run it through multiple checkers and all of them are valid. No other issues reported, just this one.

From the site:

> Our on-demand, auto-scaling servers will never slow your site down. Our tracker file is served via our super-fast CDN, with endpoints located around the world to ensure fast page loads.

This suggests that this solution is not self hosted. Is there a solution like this which is really self hosted? This service is one small change away from actually tracking.

Edit: Piwik/Matomo[1] appears to be the most mature one. [1]: https://matomo.org/

Fathom Lite is self-hosted. Lots of people start off self-hosting but it’s typically useful for people with low traffic, or for people whose time is worth less than money, or even those who enjoy it. Because you have to maintain anything you self-host. We like to cater for both.

I am also buliding something similar: https://usertrack.net/

I think the main differences compared to Matomo is that it's simpler (less features), but provides for much cheaper some of their premium features (heatmaps, session recordings).

Let me know if you have any questions about userTrack or any suggestions! :)

Fathom is open source https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one.

The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being developed.

I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more trustworthy.

You've been saying this since last year. If I can help you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please let me know.

Yeah, I've been busy.

Apparently this repo contains "Fathom Lite", a (from a codebase perspective) unrelated predecessor of what is currently being sold as a SaaS.

And it seems that Fathom Lite misses one of the main selling points of Fathom - cookieless tracking.

Yes - Fathom Lite would need a good refactor to not use cookies.

Thanks James. You wait till we launch V3 ;)

I have zero use for your product but I just want to say that I love your website ! From the minimal design to the clear and concise copy, to the signup process. It's all frictionless and smooth, you nailed it :)

That means a lot, thank you. We’ve been running Farhom since 2018, and we’ve put a lot of thought into the user experience :)

What's new for V3?

We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date

> "We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date"

not a knock on you or fathom, but it seems like you're in fast-response sales mode here (which is totally fine)... the above is a particularly empty statement. why would any next release not be the best to date?

maybe say it should be an exciting release, which is similarly anticipatory without being meaningless sales-speak.

Good point, heh. We're going to be improving speed of aggregation, real time dashboard, page / ref level metrics, more advanced goals and various other pieces.

thanks! in a background thread, i'm on the lookout for a privacy-focused analytics offering. it's for small personal things for now, so leaning toward simple and free, but who knows what the future holds.

I've been using a similar tool: https://simpleanalytics.com/.

I wish they'd offer more plans between the first 2 cheapest, though. My open-source project is hitting the basic plan limits and the next offer is too expensive for me.

SA is good, and Adrian prices their services responsibility. Fathom charges $24 / month as our 2nd tier and I do believe Adrian should offer a middle tier too. But I know nothing about his business behind the scenes, so I can’t comment. Ultimately, you can be confident that he prices his service to be sustainable, which we really respect.

Some weeks ago I discovered fathom and I am fully satisfied with it.

So glad you love it :)