[HN Gopher] How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
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How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
Author : caust1c
Score : 461 points
Date : 2022-06-24 01:54 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plausible.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (plausible.io)
| sgallant wrote:
| Plausible's website metrics are public and you can see the impact
| this article has on their traffic (due to front page of HN, I
| presume).
|
| Traffic goes from approx 4K visitors/day to almost 20K visitors
| today (so far).
|
| https://plausible.io/plausible.io
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| All their marketing seems to be pitching the product against
| Google Analytics. But they don't spend any time differentiating
| themselves from other privacy-first analytics companies, of which
| there are many.
|
| I mean, when they started in 2018:
|
| > Uku's first thought was, "Ugh. Can we just use something other
| than Google Analytics?". This is how the idea for Plausible was
| born.
|
| Surely they must have looked around and seen that there were
| already quite a few products doing privacy-first analytics? But
| yet they started anyway? And had success even though their
| marketing doesn't really state any reasons why the user should
| use them not the many other privacy-first analytics offerings out
| there?
|
| I mean I'm happy for them that they're successful, but I think
| there must be more to it than alluded to in this blog post, both
| in (a) the decision to start in the face of lots of competition
| and (b) success despite not trying to differentiate themselves
| from the competition.
| cooperadymas wrote:
| 99.999% of their potential customer base is still using Google
| Analytics. I'm not sure the comparison to anything else matters
| at this point.
|
| When you buy a Tesla you won't find comparisons about potential
| savings or benefits over other electric cars. Instead it is
| compared to the cost of ownership of a gas powered car.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| I'm not sure. If you are convinced you need privacy-first
| analytics, and thus need to get off Google Analytics (e.g.
| because you've heard about Plausible) wouldn't you at least
| do a quick google to find other products (which might be
| better/cheaper - not saying they are, but you'd at least
| look?) And then you'd need reasons to choose one over the
| other.
|
| And, when they started up, they must have googled and found
| other products and decide to start up anyway? I'd love to
| know more about that decision. Seems like it'd be difficult
| to justify, but obviously it worked out for them so maybe I'm
| just overthinking it.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| Having lots of competition doesn't mean they have equal
| market share. It doesn't matter than there are lots of
| competitors if all of them are fighting for less than 1% of
| the market share. In fact, you don't even need to worry
| about them since none of them have figured out how to
| wrestle market share away from Google.
|
| As for competition, you want to enter a market with
| competition. If there is no competition, then there must be
| a reason. Either a) there is no market at all, b) the
| market is not profitable or c) you are inventing a new
| market. I have seen many founders try to do c) because of
| your reasoning of finding something with no competition and
| fail.
|
| Competition also shows you might have timing correct. If
| they had no competition except Google, then why would
| Plausible be the only ones to see the market opportunity?
| That's extremely unlikely and would indicate to me that
| Google still had a stronghold on the market.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I second this, it's better to enter a market with some
| competition and turnover, if you are trying to invent a
| new market, even if yhe need is real, you need to explain
| to people why they need this new wiered thing they never
| considered. unless you have tremendously deep pockets,
| you probably can't afford customer education at scale.
|
| also you dont have any data to enable you to separate
| potential customers fron people who just want to waste
| your time because they are curious but wont buy. you dony
| know the buy cycle in that markrt, etc.
| testbjjl wrote:
| > And then you'd need reasons to choose one over the other.
|
| Seeing which service has customers you have heard of as a
| proxy for credibility.
| markosaric wrote:
| thanks for sharing! there's this saying in marketing that you
| should ignore anyone who's not much bigger than you so that's
| how we think about it. we focus on the tools with a large
| audience and ignore the rest as few people in our target
| audience would have heard about them. people tell us all the
| time how they didn't even know alternatives to GA existed
| before they found us and that tells a lot about the state of
| the market for millions of sites that use GA
| stedman wrote:
| They address this in the linked blog post:
| https://plausible.io/blog/the-analytics-tool-i-want
|
| > When I looked around I was fully ready to pick up another
| tool and install it on Gigride immediately. > > Turns out there
| are some alternatives for Google Analytics but I didn't find
| any of them compelling. Simple Analytics and Fathom are the
| closest to my ideal but they are a bit too barebones to be
| useful for my use-case. For example, it's quite important to me
| what browsers versions my users are on - if I use a css rule
| that isn't supported in IE7, how many users does it affect?
| Neither Fathom or Simple Analytics provide that answer
| currently. > > This seems like an opportunity to build the tool
| that I really want.
| Chris86 wrote:
| We capture browser version in Squeaky analytics at the
| moment, but we don't surface it cause nobody ever asked for
| it haha. If you want to try/use it I'm happy to visualise it
| for you!
| marvinblum wrote:
| I also started a privacy-friendly analytics SaaS without
| looking at the market. Sometimes it's better to just get
| started. Otherwise you probably won't start doing anything, as
| there are existing products most of the time. In my case, I was
| looking for a Go (golang) solution that I could embed in my
| website, as a library so to speak, and just turned it into a
| product later as I was looking for a new project to work on.
|
| We're now at $1500 MRR and growing. I'm also opposing the
| position of "just being against GA" now and we try to
| differentiate more. It's almost impossible to get anyone away
| from GA who does do performance marketing. So I don't quite see
| how Plausible or other privacy-friendly products are a
| replacement. But most websites that use GA just don't have to,
| because they don't rely so much on ads or personal data to get
| value.
|
| Our product: https://pirsch.io
| madmax108 wrote:
| Since reading the thread on money-making side hustles on HN a few
| days back[1], I was able to finally brush off my procrastination
| and start twiddling with some of my side projects that have been
| lying dormant over the years! And the model Plausible uses (I
| think the right term is "Open Core"?) which is also used by the
| incredible Product analytics tool Posthog [1] aligns really well
| with how I want to build out my side-hustles. Open source, but
| also available packaged and hosted if you so prefer.
|
| One thing I was concerned about was about revenue that these
| "open source by default" products make, so glad that this post
| has come along just in time to alleviate some of those concerns
| (of course, as with most engineering side projects, the priority
| is to build something cool first, and if it ends up making some
| money, then all the better!) and it's always nice to see
| successful OSS-driven products in a crowded analytics space.
|
| Congrats folks!
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696
|
| [2] https://posthog.com/
| GordonS wrote:
| Posthog looks really nice, but given the focus on Kubernetes
| for deployment, and the number of services deployed (Postgres,
| Clickhouse, Zookeeper, Redis, Kafka, a worker, and the web app
| itself), I presume it's aimed at large sites?
| james_impliu wrote:
| For small sites there's a hobby deployment
| (https://posthog.com/docs/self-host/deploy/hobby) that costs
| $10/month to host (we can't get it below that at the moment),
| or we give a lot of free usage away on cloud for smaller
| sites. I'd stress we're product focussed (product analytics +
| session recording + feature flags + experiments), and
| plausible is web analytics (Google Analytics alternative), so
| choose accordingly!
| [deleted]
| rambambram wrote:
| I don't have a need for your product, but that site looks
| fingerlicking nice!
| james_impliu wrote:
| (I'm a PostHog cofounder - we get about 35% of revenue from (2)
| and 65% from (3) below)
|
| There are three established ways to make money from open source
| if you're thinking about this.. my default recommendation would
| be the exact model Plausible uses today - (3) below, if you are
| just getting started and either bootstrapped or VC backed in
| today's funding environment.
|
| 1. paid support
|
| Advantages: (i) no need to build any extra features or set up
| hosting for your customers up front - low risk of wasting time
| in case you don't get product market fit with your paid product
| (ii) probably a good way to get close to users, as long as you
| don't end up over-fitting to 1 or 2 edge case use cases (who
| are, likely, those most likely to need paid support) - however,
| this will happen naturally if you set up a slack/discord
| community and you help people out for free
|
| Disadvantages: (i) you are no longer a builder, so you're not
| doing 100% leveraged work, so the margins are slimmer (ii) will
| take some time to get to revenue because you will need a
| reasonably popular project to get much demand (iii) this will
| be hard to fund if you want to do the VC route, there are
| exceptions though
|
| 2. extra, paid self-hosted features
|
| description: you have an open source project, and users can buy
| premium features on top for a fee of some kind
|
| Advantages: (i if you target enterprises who don't want to send
| data outside their environment who don't want to buy closed
| source SAAS products - they can try + buy much your product
| faster than your competition's
|
| Disadvantages: (i) it's hard to avoid customers expecting
| support managing the instance (just because they're paying you,
| even though you "just" sold extra features) (ii) you have to
| build a lot since you need an open source product and a paid
| product on top - so it needs a lot of investment to do this
| without hurting the open source project's value (I'd strongly
| recommend you get VC if you do this option, as you'll probably
| find bigger order values but slower sales cycles as well as all
| the building work) (iii) many people think everyone is moving
| to cloud, but we've seen there is a ton of underserved market
| here (more than enough to get to $100M+ revenue in our market
| at least), and increasing legislation around user privacy is
| keeping pressure on here
|
| 3. paid hosting of the project
|
| description: you have an open source project, and users can pay
| you to host it for them
|
| If you are bootstrapping or even VC backed in today's funding
| environment, I'd recommend defaulting to open source project
| _and_ a cloud hosted version as your paid version, unless
| there's a good reason not to.
|
| Advantages: (i) this is the fastest way to monetize (ii) for
| users without self hosting needs, this is likely a better user
| experience - less work to manage, so you may just grow a lot
| quicker initially
|
| Disadvantages: (i) you need to manage the hosted version (ii)
| at a product level, you are potentially competing head on with
| closed source SAAS
| boberoni wrote:
| It looks like PostHog uses a permissive license (MIT). For
| business model (3), how fo you defend against other companies
| taking your project and selling a hosted version themself?
| This was a problem for Elastic and AWS, iirc
| james_impliu wrote:
| There is a range of paid extra functionality that isn't MIT
| licensed (the extras that make up part 2's paid offer
| above), so if AWS hosts it "competitively" it'll be missing
| many of the extra features larger organizations would want
| to buy. If we didn't have these extras, we'd probably need
| a non permissive license or a belief that AWS competing
| like this would increase awareness so much it could be a
| good thing.
| janmo wrote:
| I have been using Google Analytics for years and it has become
| really crappy. Especially the latest release where you can't even
| see your daily traffic anymore. Everything is lagging behind, you
| can only see the actual data 2 days after the fact. On the other
| hand I have 3M+ page views, which would induce a $129/month
| Plausible bill. That's simply too much, especially because I have
| a very low CPM.
| aembleton wrote:
| Might be worth self hosting Plausible
| https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I'm also a happy customer.
|
| There must be a lesson here in doing one thing well.
|
| Thousands of people choosing to pay when there is a massively
| more powerful and fully featured free alternative.
|
| Web analytics have also been around for decades, and even today
| there is no shortage of competition.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I think it really demonstrates how much more important
| execution is than an idea. Being the "simple" version of X or X
| for "niche user" can be a viable strategy rather than coming up
| with some revolutionary product idea. It also lends itself to
| competing as a small team, since larger competitors can't
| afford to pay close attention to those smaller verticals.
| boberoni wrote:
| I might be abusing the term here, but Plausible seems like the
| best example of a mittelstand[1] that sells SaaS.
|
| They are not beholden to VC investors and can grow slowly,
| organically. According to this article, they were able to cover
| their costs by January 2021. By keeping their team small, they
| can remain sustainable for a long time and refine their product.
|
| The biggest challenge for growth right now seems to be that
| customer support costs will scale linearly with growth.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31327219
| WA wrote:
| Scaling customer support is the biggest fear, but I think it
| isn't as bad as people think it is.
|
| 1. You can get a long way with extensive FAQ and give people
| ways to help themselves.
|
| 2. Existing customers don't need the same kind of handholding
| as new customers, because they know the software pretty well.
|
| 3. It is up to you how much actual support you provide.
|
| 4. Customer support heavily depends on the kind of customers
| you have/want. If you provide something for free, you get a lot
| more stupid support requests than if you charge a modest fee.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| this is right. I ran a fairly technical b2b SaaS product with
| hundreds of paid users and we had ~10 hours of support a
| month, most of which was driven by new features. If you keep
| the product simple and build your docs into the product, you
| can get by with a few hours of support a week.
| jorts wrote:
| You can also charge for different levels of support.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I believe the existing term of art is "bootstrapped business"
| hodgesrm wrote:
| That's the _current_ term of art. It used to be "lifestyle
| business," which has a more passive-aggressive feel to it.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Or 'mom and pop', which is even more derogatory (at least
| here in Silicon Valley).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Customer support can definitely be handled or "minimized" by
| what I'd call "extreme thoughtfulness". Design your application
| with the correct abstractions, be ready to redesign everything
| from the ground up every two years as requirements change, and
| constantly try to create tooling that will help customers and
| CSMs serve as much as possible themselves.
| anyfactor wrote:
| I usually apply to customer support/success role. My strategy
| to build a solid customer support system -
|
| - Always incorporate gifs with documentation and guidelines
|
| - Create video and step by step tutorials unconditionally
|
| - Convert every customer interaction to an FAQ segment or a
| microblog
|
| - Avoid writing books as documentation blogs. Adopt w3school
| like writing habits.
|
| - Post your FAQs to stackoverflow. Two dummy accounts. One to
| post the questions, one to answer the question
|
| - Add every meta information and phrasing variations possible
| to commonly asked questions
|
| - Support/success staff should also be a part of the dev team
| so they can understand the product philoshophy and not just be
| a liaison of the dev.
|
| TLDR: Make customer interaction as google-able as you can.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I suspect that support costs are actually sub-linear, as you
| scale you don't just add support staff, you start putting in
| extra stages to redirect support - better documentation, UX
| designers, community support. Support requests are a mix of
| unique challenges and common challenges, the common challenges
| can always be pushed towards a fixed support cost.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Everyone talks about revenue -- but what about profits? What's
| more interesting to me are companies that make a profit after
| expenses.
| sscarduzio wrote:
| This kind of indie companies are financially extremely
| efficient. I reckon between 80% and 90% of their revenue is
| profit.
| phgn wrote:
| Now please use that money to build more features!
|
| I tell everyone to use Plausible AND a more in-depth events
| tracking platform -- you'll regret it otherwise if you ever want
| to track churn rates.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Why should they? They obviously got a winning formular.
| yrgulation wrote:
| "We're intentionally small, profitable and sustainable."
|
| This here ^^. Too many fall in the trap of agiling themselves to
| death. Instead, find the right people with the right skills and
| dont force process. Communicate well and frequently and you've
| got yourself a well oiled team. Current client has successfully
| managed to daily, retro and refine themselves to a drop in
| productivity by at least 20%. My invoices are coming in nicely,
| despite wasting days on meetings that could have been an email or
| a short call with the relevant stakeholders, but i'll fire the
| client first chance i find one that actually wants me to work and
| not play "fun" t-shirt planning pokers.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Same goes for me. It's fucking insane we waste do much time
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >"We're intentionally small, profitable and sustainable." This
| here ^^. Too many fall in the trap of agiling themselves to
| death.
|
| How do you know they don't use agile? Being small, profitable
| and sustainable is not necessarily != Agile.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How did you build your landing page, it's very nice
|
| How was your acquisition strategy for your first customers?
| Content marketing?
| kondro wrote:
| Looks like TailwindCSS.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > We're a completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped
| team of four
|
| $250k/yr each, +/- payroll taxes, etc. etc.
| bushbaba wrote:
| That doesn't include hosting costs. So likely closer to
| 150k/employee of take home pay.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Not in a million years would it take $400k to run Plausible.
| It would be a fraction of this.
| bushbaba wrote:
| The 150k/year also accounts for overhead such-as taxes, HR,
| cash reserves for rainy day, software licensing etc.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Anyone who things $250k is a normal salary has probably never
| left one of 20 or so top US tech cities.
|
| Where I live, Sydney, it is impossible to get that in tech
| outside of executive management (which is not coding), rare
| positions at unicorns, and HFT C++ type jobs.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| This is why so much of the best talent from Sydney, including
| a very talented former colleague of mine, are lured to Palo
| Alto and nearby cities.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yeah it is tempting! I don't think you even need to be "the
| best" right?
| greatwhitenorth wrote:
| Yeah, the cost of running the company (software, server,
| marketing, sales, etc..) is important. ARR never shows the true
| picture.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They could scale to $10M without probably any extra staff, or
| maybe an extra SRE? It isn't Twitter: They don't need an army
| of bloat-adding squads.
| rattray wrote:
| I haven't read much of the article, but they claim early on
| that they have no marketing spend. Do they say later in the
| article what their sales, saas, and server costs are like?
| tpetry wrote:
| They don't have a sales team, so no cost. So it's barely
| sone SaaS they use by themselves (e.g. slack etc.) and
| server costs.
|
| As they are running very lean I expect at least 80% margin.
| make_it_sure wrote:
| Are all 4 developers? it looks way too much. What's left for
| other parts of the business?
|
| I say this as a founder of a $1.5 mil/year SaaS
| tpetry wrote:
| It's one developer, one marketer and when I remember
| correctly two for support.
| [deleted]
| mylons wrote:
| i guess they might as well pack it in and go work at a MANGA
| nowherebeen wrote:
| Maybe in dollar terms, but assuming the business keeps
| growing: they have sustainable income, they don't need to
| worry about getting laid off, they don't need to play
| politics with leadership, and they can turn the business into
| passive income by hiring someone to take over.
|
| At this stage they are a lifestyle business, its not hard to
| grow it even more if they get investments. If they can sell
| the business over $10 million, they already surpass what most
| corporate employees will earn in their career. That's a very
| attainable valuation in 2022 with a PM fit product.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| And slave away for the rest of their lives?
|
| I'm sure they're not killing themselves with work and I'd
| trade equity in plausible with any job
| throwaway378037 wrote:
| Revenue != profit
| wharfjumper wrote:
| 7+ billion people can only dream of this kind of money.
| [deleted]
| codeptualize wrote:
| This is very inspirational, it's my dream to build a business
| like that.
|
| It's also great to see that it is still possible to build
| sustainable businesses without the more shady practices and
| growth hacking you often see, without millions of vc funding,
| without aggressive hiring. Just a small but strong team and a
| great product.
|
| It looks like it was a long journey, I applaud the perseverance,
| and congratulate them on their well deserved success.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > With all the new trials and customers, and an increase in
| larger websites trying our service, Plausible became much slower
| to use. (...) We moved from our PostgreSQL database to ClickHouse
|
| Had the impression they were monitoring up to a couple hundred
| websites at that time. Probably small ones.
|
| I'm surprised Postgres was slowing them down. Maybe the queries
| or the database were not well optimized?
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| If you need customizable reports (filtering and aggregating by
| any dimension), you cannot avoid scan over non-aggregated data.
| This is where you cannot optimize Postgres queries. Postgres
| becomes slow starting from just single million records.
| your_challenger wrote:
| This is one of the best blog post on company building I've read.
| Actually the only one I've loved! (All I've read are VC garbage)
| majani wrote:
| What makes it such that the majority of such stories are in SaaS?
| Or are the SaaS success stories just the loud minority since they
| are very dependent on content marketing?
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Not trying to rude but yes, this bootstrappers space is very
| noisy about MRR/ARR and there are very few of them I heard
| constantly. It apparently it is how it is .. to be done this
| way, otherwise only private channel sales is not going to be
| enough. If there are more successful bootstrappers, it's going
| to get worse (flooding environment where people hangout).
|
| And most of SaaS that makes lots of money are in shovels
| business (during gold rush). Or probably so called "tools that
| help you make more money" (finger cross). Be it analytics,
| marketing content generator, social media post schedulers. Oh
| my.. I don't love marketing tools but they make shit ton of
| money of out B2C trying to reach millions of people.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| getting people to subscribe at 100$ per month is an easier sell
| than asking (let's say 1 yr churn) 1200$ once
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I love posts like this because they help set expectations. I'm
| building a real-time SaaS (among other things) and I've got a lot
| on my plate.
|
| I also use plausible.
| jacky2wong wrote:
| Great read! Thanks for posting
| mbStavola wrote:
| We're currently on the 500K views/mo plan and are more than happy
| customers.
|
| They're affordable, ethical, and the product does exactly what I
| want and nothing more. I simply love Plausible and I'm happy to
| see them picking up steam!
| Dowwie wrote:
| Can you comment on the impact that Elixir has had for your
| platform? Usually reports of technology decisions are biased
| towards the positive, so sharing any challenges that you've
| experienced along the way would be really helpful. Do you think
| that Elixir was the right tool for the job and if you could start
| over again, would you choose it?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't understand how AGPL protects them from cloud providers
| hosting their stuff. The cloud providers could:
|
| - Host the code unmodified, which is within the terms of the
| licence
|
| - Host the code modified, and release the mods, which is within
| the terms of the licence
|
| Surely the worry is they will just host and charge for it for
| less then Plausible can, which AGPL doesn't stop (to my
| knowledge)?
| danuker wrote:
| It could be that the "mods" of a different company are their
| whole IP. That is why they'd avoid AGPL.
|
| And competing might not offer enough of a margin. Integration
| is hard, even if they save on the codebase itself.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Interesting. The case in thinking of is ElasticSearch, where
| AWS just hosted it themselves and it's easy to deploy, works
| with CloudFormation and billed the normal way. AGPL wouldn't
| have changed any of that.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| What are they using for creating the static content pages from
| the .md files?
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| I use plausible analytics to measure traffic on my observable
| notebooks. I did try with GA but it didn't work with Observable's
| iframe sandboxing. Because plausible is open source, I could
| fiddle with it a little and could get it to report the top level
| page user facing URLs instead of the iframe's. Very happy I can
| get traffic stats from a site I don't own and very happy I don't
| need user consent because it's GFPR compliant. It tracks just
| what I am interested... My traffic, and with a little config it
| excludes my own page views. Great product, perfect for my use
| case I wish them well.
|
| https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/plausible-analyti...
| NorwegianDude wrote:
| It's a cool service, especially for those who don't need the more
| advanced features of Google Analytics.
|
| The new Google Analytics is a mess to use, but at least it's no
| longer limited to ~"10M" hits for free each month.
| dpcan wrote:
| So, if an open source company changes their license, the code
| that existed before the license change still exists under the
| previous license right?
| conductr wrote:
| INAL but think the license is version controlled along with the
| code
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Let's not forget that these guys are extremely good at marketing.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| One of the guys is extremely good at marketing. They only
| started making substainable money after the marketing guy
| joined.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| What you see here; this article, the technical writing,
| getting buddies to hype on twitter, forums etc. is marketing
| directed towards a technical audience (who are the buyers of
| this product). I think they are both extremely good at it.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The writer of this article acknowledges in the very same
| article that they were hired as a marketer, over a year
| after Plausible was started (see Feb 2020). This article is
| part of their job marketing towards a technical audience.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > I think they are both extremely good at it.
|
| Look at their revenue charts and the part where the revenue
| starts to grow is about a month after the marketer joined.
| One may have learned a trick or two but the other is
| extremely good.
|
| It's like how when working on a team with someone who is
| amazing everyone on the team are able to do their job
| better and improve. This doesn't make everyone on the team
| amazing, this just means the amazing person made everyone
| better.
| winrid wrote:
| Looks like it runs on Elixir and ClickHouse, neat.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Huh turns out plausible.io is blocked by my pihole. What's the
| case for unblocking this flavor of analytics?
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I'm a happy Plausible customer for https://allthecode.co - the
| privacy aspect is amazing but the killer feature for me? Actually
| understanding my website data and knowing how to find where
| traffic comes from and where is goes without needing to search
| for hours on end. GA is a disaster of UX now and this is
| wonderful in comparison.
| pgl wrote:
| I like Plausible, and ethical analytics services in general. I'd
| certainly use them over Google Analytics. But it does frustrate
| me that Plausible (and others) take the stance that because they
| are doing what they can to preserve privacy, they have an
| absolute right to collect telemetry about users.
|
| This includes things like CNAME cloaking, and adding a local JS
| proxy script so that visits can be sent back to Plausible's
| servers to make it harder to block for the user. The user has
| expressed a clear preference for their visits not to be logged,
| and Plausible (to satisfy site owners who want every visit
| logged) have done whatever they can to circumvent that.
|
| I get it - it's a business, and making sure the site owners are
| happy is a big part of making money. But it grates that the whole
| thing is supposed to be about privacy while ways to get around
| privacy preferences are baked in.
| jaywalk wrote:
| What aspect of your "privacy" do you believe Plausible is
| violating? None of the (very minimal) data they collect is even
| linked to you in any way. There are no cookies or any other
| persistent identifiers. Raw web server logs (which you _cannot_
| opt-out of, for obvious reasons) are more intrusive to your
| "privacy" than Plausible.
| pgl wrote:
| Is it a "strawman" argument where people try to get you to
| respond to a point you haven't made?
| jaywalk wrote:
| No, it's a legitimate question. There is literally nothing
| you can do to stop a website from logging your visit, so I
| don't understand your argument here. Visit logging (what
| Plausible does) and tracking (what Google Analytics does)
| are two very different things.
| pgl wrote:
| Plausible is a third party that logs visits for analytics
| purposes. An end user expresses their preference (eg,
| with some sort of blocking browser extension) that the
| site doesn't send details off to a third party. Then the
| analytics service provides an easy way to work around
| this preference, and if that's blocked again then they
| provide another way, etc. They explicitly work around the
| end user's choice.
|
| Why does it matter what the reason is for the end user's
| preference? Or if the data is being stored in a way
| that's currently difficult to deobfuscate? It's ironic
| that the whole push is "end user privacy", ie something
| that benefits the end user, but multiple workarounds are
| offered when the end user (for whatever reason) doesn't
| want their visits logged on a third party.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Saying that using an ad blocker equals a user expressing
| their preference to not have their visit logged to a
| third party is a pretty weak connection.
|
| As long as none of your personal data is involved, it's
| not your data. It belongs to the website operator, and
| they can do with it what they please.
| pgl wrote:
| (Why is it these kinds of discussions get snotty so
| quickly?)
|
| I don't know how else an end user can express their
| preference.
|
| IP addresses are PII under the GDPR with enough context -
| although honestly I don't want to go down that horrible
| rabbit hole.
|
| But sure, sure, the site operators can do whatever they
| please. It's just Plausible banging on about being
| privacy friendly and ethical seems a bit ironic and is
| frustrating to see.
|
| Edit: The DNT flag is explicitly ignored by Plausible as
| well:
| https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/646
| jaywalk wrote:
| Plausible is correct in ignoring the DNT flag, as it does
| not apply to the data they collect. Have you read the DNT
| policy that the EFF created, which is linked in that
| issue? It goes further than what the W3C defined, and it
| _still_ does not apply to the data Plausible collects. In
| fact, it explicitly _allows_ the collection of more data
| than Plausible actually collects.
|
| You're really stretching definitions here, and have yet
| to make an actual argument about how Plausible invades
| your privacy. I'll just end my involvement in this
| discussion here, because it's clear to me that it will
| not be productive.
| pgl wrote:
| Okey dokey
| sherbondy wrote:
| Pretty darn fun to be able to see the Hacker News front page
| effect in realtime since they have their own site's Plausible
| stats publicly available!
|
| https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=30d&source=Hacker+N...
|
| What a great demo of the product :D
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm surprised the baseline's so low? (Single digits)
| hdkrgr wrote:
| That's incoming traffic from HN only. Remove that filter and
| it's closer to 5k visitors/day.
| OJFord wrote:
| Ah! That makes a lot more sense, thanks, I didn't spot
| that.
|
| (In case Plausible people are here: I found it a lot more
| obvious on the desktop site, in fact when I saw it there I
| thought 'oh it just doesn't show the filter on mobile', but
| then when I switched back saw it does, I just hadn't
| noticed it.)
| markosaric wrote:
| good point, thanks! we had to shorten the top menu on
| mobile devices to fit all the important stuff so you only
| see "X filters" rather than the full filter as on the
| desktop
| quincunx wrote:
| What a great link.
|
| At the time of writing, Goal Conversions:
|
| - Visit/blog 12800
|
| - Signup 8
|
| I knew anecdotally that HN doesn't convert but, _oof_ , that's
| rough..
| bitexploder wrote:
| HN influences. It makes a wide and deeply technical circle
| aware. Maybe a week, month, year they suggest [or recommend
| to peers], etc. organic growth business like Plausible is
| about surviving long enough to keep growing your network
| effect. All these mentions and discussions add up. People
| remember.
| markosaric wrote:
| exactly! our first "viral" moment was on HN too and we only
| got a few direct signups that day but we would never have
| made it to this point without being on the top of HN that
| time
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