After months of using Google Analytics I realized only about 50% of people accepted my cookie-popup. I had months of incorrect data for my website. I started looking for alternatives and eventually found Plausible, which is great (and open-source). Problem is, I didn't feel like paying 9$ a month to see the amount of visitors on a website i didn't even earn anything on, it was just a hobby project.

Eventually I started making my own web analytics. Which actually isn't that hard. It took me about a month of working on my spare time every now and then. Being GDPR compliant basically means to not save any personal identifiers. At first I thought it would be easy since something like a public IP adress can't count as a personal identifier right? I was very wrong.

How it works: When a user visited my website I saved the IP and Header for 24 hours. Then if they visited again I checked the combination of IP and Header against the ones saved in my DB. If they were the same I simply added 1 view to my data. If they weren't the same I added 1 unique daily user and 1 view.

That's in short how it works. A few weeks later I realized if I had this problem then other would also have it. So I started working on Simplytics.dev. I had to do a lot of new stuff and re-build my code from the ground-up twice. Small things like OAuth was completely new to me and took up a lot of time.

But eventually I got here and just launched something that with the knowledge I have today wouldn't even take a third of the time recreating today. It's my first real "Launch" and it feels really good finally creating something AND publishing it. Instead of a montly fee I opted to make it a pay-once service. Right now it's priced at 49$ but I'll see how it works out.

If you got any questions on how it works Id love to answer them.