Analytics and monitoring decision
GoSquared
A small team can reproduce the core real-time analytics loop and a basic dashboard, but matching GoSquared's production-grade real-time infrastructure, extensive integrations, polished product polish, and trust credentials would be costly and time-consuming—so build a narrow replacement and keep paying for the full product if you need scale and support.
Visit website↗$9/mo
$108/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$25/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 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 GoSquared alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect visitor pageviews/events from a small JS snippet, ingest and deduplicate events in a server endpoint, store aggregated metrics in a Postgres/Redis store, serve a simple dashboard with live updates (websockets) and provide a basic REST API and daily email report job.
What it still won’t have
- High-scale, low-latency infrastructure built for real-time at scale
- Polished, production-grade UI and dozens of features (100+ features listed)
- Large catalogue of prebuilt integrations and plugins
- GDPR third-party certification and privacy compliance assurances
- Award-winning customer support and company longevity reputation
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Built for real-time from day one.
- Brand trust
We've been doing this since 2006. We're UK-based, profitable, and independent.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 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 self-hosted real-time web analytics service using: Next.js for the dashboard + API routes, a small server (Node/Express) for ingestion, Postgres for historical aggregates, Redis for recent counters, and a worker (Node) for daily email reports. In-scope: JS snippet to send pageview/event beacons, ingestion endpoint with validation and dedupe, aggregation into Postgres and Redis, websocket-driven realtime dashboard, REST API endpoints for metrics and CSV export, and a scheduled job to send daily email reports. Out of scope: enterprise integrations catalogue, GDPR third-party certification, multi-tenant billing, and large-scale autoscaling. Include error handling, input validation, unit tests for ingestion/aggregation logic, and basic deployment docs (Docker + managed Postgres/Redis).
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
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
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 productGoSquared homepage
- official pricingGoSquared pricing
- official docsGoSquared features
- open sourceumami-software/umami
- open sourceplausible/analytics
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
