Analytics and monitoring decision
Cabin
A capable developer can build a useful, privacy-first analytics replacement (tracking, storage, dashboard, CO₂ calc) within a week and low monthly hosting cost, but matching Cabin's EU-compliant guarantees, production polish, and proven large-scale operations requires more effort or trust in hosting/legal controls.
Visit website↗$19/mo
$228/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$30/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Cabin alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect anonymous pageview and custom event hits via a lightweight script, store aggregated events in a database, provide a small dashboard to view metrics (visitors, countries, devices) and export CSV, implement privacy-first data model (no cookies/IP hashing) and a CO₂ reporting calculation.
What it still won’t have
- EU-only, end-to-end encrypted storage and processing guarantee
- 100% renewable-energy hosting claim
- Out-of-the-box CO₂ reporting and carbon-conscious tooling
- Polished, production-grade dashboard, email reports and public dashboards
- Proven multi-billion pageview scale and operational polish
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
Your analytics are end-to-end encrypted, processed and stored exclusively in the EU , making us fully GDPR compliant and truly privacy-first.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal privacy-first web analytics service using Node.js (Express) backend, Postgres for aggregated metrics, and a React frontend (Next.js). In scope: a <5KB tracking script to send anonymous pageview and custom event hits; ingestion endpoint that validates and stores events; nightly aggregation job; CO₂ estimate calculator from asset sizes and traffic; a dashboard showing visits, devices, countries, custom events, CSV export, and a weekly email report worker. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, large-scale sharding, public dashboards, and training any ML models. Include request validation, error handling, tests for ingestion and aggregation, and deployment scripts (Docker + a single VPS or managed DB).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productCabin | Privacy-first, Google Analytics alternative
- official pricingPricing | Cabin Analytics
- open sourcerybbit-io/rybbit
- open sourcemilesmcc/shynet
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
