Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics(github.com)

283 points by gernest 1 year ago | 86 comments

For the past 3 years I have been working on a Golang port of plausible analytics dashboard.

vince is a single binary, single user with multiple website system with zero runtime dependency.

Key featues:

- Automatic TLS - Outbounds link tracking - File downloads tracking - 404 pages tracking - Custom event tracking

And so much more, basically everything that you see on plausible dashboard except funnels and custom properties.

You can use vince as a drop in replacement for plausible for personal websites.

The goal is to make the plausible dashboard easily accessible for people who like to self host.

All features not related to the dashboard are non goal, hence not implemented.

Full dashboard demo hosted on 6$ vultr instance https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/...

zoidb 1 year ago |

My go-to self hosted GA alternative is goatcounter https://www.goatcounter.com. It would be interesting to know what advantages it has over it.

huhtenberg 1 year ago | |

Does it allow filtering visited page list by a specific referrer and vice verse?

zoidb 1 year ago | | |

Yes, it does if I understand what you mean. You can see the traffic distribution (what paths were accessed) broken down by referrer.

james-bcn 1 year ago | |

Oh I like that main dashboard. Very simple.

TravisPeacock 1 year ago | | |

If you like that there is https://www.piratepx.com/ which is even more minimal (though less data), I also built something even MORE minimal (only API calls) https://github.com/teamcoltra/ninjapx but I'm certainly not recommending it. It is super simplistic (also the readme is embarrassing)

vextea 1 year ago |

There seems to be some mentions of selling licenses (and pricing) in the source. What are the plans around that?

https://github.com/vinceanalytics/vince/blob/f0c2c3cc38cbd8c...

gernest 1 year ago | |

When I started working on vince, I thought I could bootstrap a sustainable business, that was about 3 years ago.

My dream for a business is practically dead now. That snippet is a relic of early days of vince and I will remove it.

I am currently looking for work, and will be maintaining vince as usual (I do a lot of open source stuff) since I also use it with my hobby projects.

I'm struggling finding remote roles now, since remote now means Remote US or Remote EU and I'm stuck here in Tanzania.

So, don't worry, I also use vince so I will keep hacking on it.

vextea 1 year ago | | |

Makes sense, wish you the best of luck!

written-beyond 1 year ago |

Code quality is pristine, really great job! I see that you've used protocol buffers, can you expand on why? I am aware of the benefits it offers but I think it adds a bit of mental overhead initially due to it being an additional type system you have to understand.

Also why are you using pebble exactly? I was interested in seeing how you're managing your geo databases because that's usually the most mind numbing part of handling analytics if your cloud provider doesn't add that information into the request header already. However, I can't understand why you'd use pebble over something like sqlite.

gernest 1 year ago | |

Thanks,

> Why protocol buffers ?

They are very good for defining API boundaries, in vince we only use them for configuration and admin structure. We use Roaring Bitmap based storage, so fundamental units persisted are Bitmap containers.

> Also why are you using pebble exactly?

Well, vince is write heavy and any LSM based key value store would have been nice. It happens pebble is the best option for us.

Also, we don't use transactions (We batch writes and use snapshots for reads). Combining with the fact we rely on pebble batch Merge api.

The merge api allows us to do efficient updates. Since we only store bitmap containers, when doing update we just do a container union of observed values of a key.

Bitmap unions are pretty fast and efficient.

I hope I covered all your questions.

written-beyond 1 year ago | | |

It answered them alright, but really opened a few hundred more. I appreciate your time!

just-tom 1 year ago |

The screenshot on your homepage looks very similar to plausible's https://plausible.io/ which is also open-source analytics software. Is it based on it? What are the differences?

Edit: Just noticed the feature comparison in the readme.

dewey 1 year ago | |

Also Plausible is almost stock TailwindUI elements + including the default color, so many sites look like that.

rgbrgb 1 year ago |

> Full dashboard demo hosted on 6$ vultr instance https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/share/vinceanalytics.com/v1/...

404 page not found

thangngoc89 1 year ago | |

I found a link from github https://demo.vinceanalytics.com/v1/share/vinceanalytics.com?...

XCSme 1 year ago | | |

That looks exactly like Plausible

pdyc 1 year ago |

Looks exactly like plausible, may be change the ui a bit to avoid legal issues.

carlosjobim 1 year ago | |

I was going to say that it looks exactly like BeamAnalytics, and now I'm confused to who's copying who...

serial_dev 1 year ago | | |

I'm wondering when copying becomes just following industry best practices...

Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky all look the same. Project management apps all reuse the same UI patterns. The "AI" logo looked pretty much the same for all companies for a while. Video sharing websites all use YouTube's layout. Forums like Reddit and HN share quite a lot in their looks.

If you want to display website analytics, you will want to show the most important metrics at a glance, you'll need graphs showing visitors over time, top sources and pages... There is only so much you can do to display those and have users understand what's going on on your website.

dewey 1 year ago | | |

Because everyone is using: https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing

NelsonMinar 1 year ago | |

What legal issues are you imagining?

colesantiago 1 year ago |

Great project keep it up it's good to see competition in this space.

Plausible gets crazy expensive on their hosted option and it complex to setup (needs elixir + high memory requirements)

If Vince gets 1:1 parity with plausible and has the option to use clickhouse, I'll consider moving a few servers and people I know over.

Love that Vince is also a single binary as well.

slyall 1 year ago |

Going through the docs I find you don't actually have a bit about how to make your website to use it. I mean I can work it would and it'll be obvious to proper front end developers but at not point do you say:

"Add the following line to you page source to send data to Vince"

gonafr 1 year ago |

How this compares to umami (https://umami.is/)?

arcastroe 1 year ago | |

I'm also interested in this. They seem to have very similar UI

brokegrammer 1 year ago |

This is amazing! I self host Plausible but don't like depending on Clickhouse and Postgres because they're annoying to upgrade.

What kind of database is this using though? I don't know enough Go to figure it out from the source.

tricked 1 year ago | |

I checked the go.mod and it seems to be importing a module named pebble by cockroachdb i assume that's where everything is stored

https://github.com/cockroachdb/pebble

akshayshah 1 year ago | |

It uses Pebble, the key-value store that backs CockroachDB.

colesantiago 1 year ago | | |

Just saw this notice:

> WARNING: Pebble may silently corrupt data or behave incorrectly if used with a RocksDB database that uses a feature Pebble doesn't support. Caveat emptor!

Slightly worrying for now running this in prod if there is a risk for silent data corruption, but hopefully in a few years Vince would have drivers for Postgres / Clickhouse.

kukkeliskuu 1 year ago |

This is great. For me the commercial Plausible is just not plausible. I have a site with 2M page views, with most of the pages cached, which keeps the server costs minimal, I pay around 50 USD per month. I don't get much revenue from the site. I want to show visit counts on the site. For 2M page views, Plausible (with the stats API) would cost 189 USD per month, quadrupling my costs.

gernest 1 year ago | |

This is one of the reason I created vince.

For reference, the demo is hosted on a 6$ vultr instance, the last 3 days it handled about 11.9K pageviws with 4.3K unique visitors.

I have just checked the vultr dashboard.

Bandwidth = 3.37 GB ,vCPU usage = 1% (yep one percent) , Current charges = 1.06$.

Majority of the bandwidth is for outgoing data serving the dashboard.

I carefully designed vince to be extremely efficient for web analytics workloads.

Please give vince a try.

maeil 1 year ago | |

2M page views and not much revenue does sound like a choice. I have no affiliation to Plausible but 2M pageviews per month has such high revenue potential that if you'd monetize it (which frankly is the logical assumption they'd operate on), $189 month would be a trivial expense.

kukkeliskuu 1 year ago | | |

You are partly correct, although it really depends. My site is in Finnish, which makes Google AdSense the only really viable option, unless I want to spend lots of time finding affiliate marketing revenue. That pays approximately 1.3 euros per 1000 page views, and does not work well with mobile page views on my site. I get 2M page views on high season, now it is off-season and visit counts are lower. I really get only around 20 euros per day on ad revenue, which makes around 600 euros per month. 200 euros per month cost is not "trivial". I have some other revenue, but that is small as well. Header bidding companies are interested to work with you if you have 5M+ page views per month. On a longer term, I think there is potential, but sure, I have made the decision to make the site foremost a public service, and revenue is secondary.

openplatypus 1 year ago | |

Hi, just FYI, the Wide Angle Analytics (my product) will cost you between 30 and 90 EUR per month for 1M and 10M accordingly.

There are many web analytics providers with surprisingly high prices.

We are cheaper and even planning on creating free tier by making smart use of resources and avoiding overpriced cloud providers.

lovegrenoble 1 year ago |

Is is a Plausible clone? https://plausible.io

__jonas 1 year ago | |

From the Readme:

> vince started as a Go port of plausible with a focus on self hosting.

lomkju 1 year ago |

Nice Work! Very easy to install and use.

I deployed this on our cloud (excloud.in) in less than 2 mins.

Anyone you can use the below k8s manifest to deploy it to their k8s cluster. Just change the admin password before doing so.

https://gist.github.com/lomkju/90fe7500d8cf854bf3b7c2f26aa58...

gernest 1 year ago | |

Thanks, that is very nice setup.

Does it always pull the latest vince image?

Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts

lomkju 1 year ago | | |

> Just FYI, we also have simple helm charts, and the repository is hosted on https://vinceanalytics.com/charts

Oh cool, didn't see that in the docs.

> Does it always pull the latest vince image?

Yes haven't specified any tag so should default to latest.

cebert 1 year ago |

If you haven’t checked it out yet, Serverless Website Analytics, is a great solution for this too. It’s easy to deploy and very inexpensive to run. I’ve been using it and am quite happy with it. https://github.com/rehanvdm/serverless-website-analytics

gernest 1 year ago | |

Interesting, I just checked the readme. Very similar but looks like it only works with AWS and has a lot of moving pieces.

How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions.

Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases.

With vince, I had to index embed the whole city data from geonames database to work around this.

reincoder 1 year ago | | |

> How do you deal with location data, do you purchase maxmind db license or use their free versions.

> Both maxmind and db-ip free versions of city data miss city geo id values, rendering city data useless for many cases.

I work for IPinfo.

I think you might find my conversation with Goatcounter's dev interesting: https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/765

I pitched him to use our free country database because of MaxMind's EULA issues. MaxMind does not permit distribution of the database and requires end users to use their own token. Moreover, they actually charge thousands of dollars when you distribute the "free" database with a commercial intent.

Now, we have a free IP to Country database that we offer under a straight CC-BY-SA 4.0 license without an EULA. It is free, comes with daily updates, has full accuracy, and you can even commercially redistribute the database (via providing us an attribution).

I understand we do not have a free city database to offer, nor is our database lightweight because we have full accuracy. But you can check it out if you are interested. We do have a version with ASN (ISP) information as well.

aaronbrethorst 1 year ago |

Looks interesting. What sort of memory requirements does it have and how does it persist data?

gernest 1 year ago | |

The demo, which survived HN hug of death is running on 6$ vultr instance.

RAM : 1GB

STORAGE: 25 GB

so far bandwidth used is 3.6GB

So, you can successful deploy vince on low spec servers depending on your expected traffic.

paradite 1 year ago |

Not sure why I would use this over Plausible CE on docker. Does it consume less memory/CPU?

Also I am pretty sure Plausible CE doesn't limit number of sites / events, unlike what's listed in "Comparison with Plausible Analytics".

t0mas88 1 year ago |

It says GDPR compliant and no cookies on the project page. How are unique visitors calculated? And I'm assuming it can't link conversions to campaigns without some cookie-alternative?

sira04 1 year ago |

Looks great!

I found a small bug, if you click Expand in the Top Pages section, the Time on Page column has NaNs.

Dark mode for the dashboard and showing realtime current visitors in the <title> would be great.

manishsharan 1 year ago |

I think the reason some of us continue using Google Analytics is its demographic data. That information is not available elsewhere as far as I know , which I admit is not a lot.

skeptrune 1 year ago |

Cool that there are so many of these now. Currently self hosting plausible and it does seem quite barebones. Will have to give this a shot!

samdung 1 year ago |

This is great. I'm def going to use it.

Minor bug: "See Live Demo Dashboard" url is wrongly pointed.

cchance 1 year ago |

"see live dashboard" button on main page just... goes to the top of the page lol

QuasarLogic 1 year ago |

can we compare it with Shynet? https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

Shynet is similarly self hostable, and has a tiny footprint..

cpursley 1 year ago |

How would y’all go about building analytics into a professional marketplace type of app where you can provide the professional with their own profile page stats (in a reliable way)?

rasso 1 year ago |

Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server? If so, it might really be „for everyone“. Otherwise, we are stuck with matomo.

diggan 1 year ago | |

> Does this work on your average 10,-/month shared hosting server?

Since they usually offer software via cPanel and alike, seems unlikely unless you give it lots of time for the project to first get popular enough to get on the "admin panels" mind, and secondly for them to integrate it.

Besides, do people really pay 10 USD/month for shared hosting? Sounds really expensive when you can grab VPSes for half that price and run whatever software you want, not just what they've packaged for you. I guess ongoing maintainace is included in that price, but still sounds kind of expensive for what you get.

rasso 1 year ago | | |

I don‘t know… around here (Germany), that‘s pretty common. No need to manage anything, no usage-based cost, … my favourite is https://all-inkl.com. OG no-bs hosting for boring tech.

notRobot 1 year ago |

The dashboard demo isn't working :(

8ig8 1 year ago |

Matomo is another one…

https://matomo.org/

Oras 1 year ago |

If you don't have plans to offer saas, what are you trying to achieve from it?

I mean, it is quite nice to have binary installation hosted on a single VPS, but will you support it?

rrr_oh_man 1 year ago | |

FOSS lives!

drchaim 1 year ago |

this is great, congrats!