Analytics and monitoring decision
Fathom Analytics
A competent developer/team can build a useful, privacy-first analytics clone covering the core loop, but matching Fathom’s enterprise-scale infrastructure, legal compliance work, and managed retention/SLAs is costly and time-consuming — keeping the paid service reasonable for many customers.
Visit website↗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.
What a replacement has to do
- Collect anonymous pageviews from a one-line embed script, filter bots and IPs, aggregate events/pageviews into time-series and per-page counts, and display summarized metrics on a simple dashboard with CSV export and an API.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise-grade global CDN and highly scalable, serverless infrastructure
- Legal/compliance work ensuring GDPR/CCPA/ePrivacy/PECR compliance
- Forever data retention and managed backups at scale
- Commercial SLAs, email support, and turnkey GA importer
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
we've heavily invested in enterprise-level infrastructure with great speed and reliability (we don't just host our software on cheap VPS servers that go offline).
- Compliance and regulation
we've hired the best lawyers and legal minds worldwide to ensure our simple analytics software is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, PECR and more, providing essential insights into traffic sources without compromising privacy.
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 self-hosted, privacy-first website analytics service using Node.js (Express) for ingestion, Postgres for storage, Redis for short-term counters, and React for the dashboard. In scope: one-line embed script (including SPA mode), ingestion endpoint that anonymizes IPs and blocks specified IPs/countries, bot-filtering heuristics, background rollups to hourly/daily aggregates, a dashboard showing realtime visitors/pages/referrers/devices, CSV export, and a small REST API with token auth. Out of scope: multi-region enterprise CDN, legal compliance audits, GA importer, and long-term managed backups. Provide input validation, rate limiting, error handling, and unit/integration tests for ingestion, aggregation, and API endpoints.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score57
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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFathom Analytics - homepage
- official pricingFathom Analytics - pricing
- official docsFathom Analytics - features
- open sourcerybbit-io/rybbit
- open sourcemilesmcc/shynet
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
