All the good parts of web analytics doesn't amount to much anyway. Especially if you desire to have a usable site, which includes no cookie popups.

i.e. you can't give stuff away for free if you aren't one of the 3 largest companies on the planet

Would you pay $20/month for Hacker News access?

I think it's fair that GA is free and Google gets some benefits from using the data for their ad network.

"some benefits" is really underselling it though.

Yeah just one of the core pillars that enables their unregulated monopoly that brings in billions of pure profit.

Yeah but you're missing the point. Nobody else has the worlds biggest search engine and ad network to allow them to do the same. Others have to charge.

Umami isn't half bad self hosted. Been using it with Docker Compose for a few years now on a LEB and it's working great.

It's not bad but it's a massive resource hog for what it purports to do. Shame that most of the self host analytics use things like typescript or php rather than more performant languages like Go. Speaking of which:

https://github.com/th0th/poeticmetric

Looks interesting but haven't delved in it too much. I do like how I can create specific analytic tracking events without worrying too much about ad blockers but that's hardly unique to Umami.

There's also another interesting analytics open source project whose name I am forgetting. It was written in C or something and was efficient enough to allow free usage or self hosted, it was a simple hit counter I believe.

I think you might be confusing Umami with Plausible? Plausible is a total mess of heavy-idling containers and ClickHouse. I dropped switched to Umami and have had no performance issues of any kind. It's running on ~12 year old shitbox. I do only deal with ~10K events per day max though.

I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.

In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.

Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/

Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)

Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.

Tell that to my Fortune 200 client that I've spent last 3 years migrating dozens of SaaS apps from AWS to GKE for.