Analytics and monitoring decision
Umami Cloud
A small team or single competent developer can build a useful, privacy-first analytics replacement covering core pageview/event collection and basic dashboards in about a week; richer features and hosted convenience are the main reasons to pay.
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 pageview and event hits from a tiny tracking script, store them in a relational DB, and display aggregated metrics in a simple dashboard.
What it still won’t have
- Advanced insights: funnels, retention cohorts, journeys
- Session replays and heatmaps
- Teams/collaboration features and role management
- Managed cloud convenience and hosted backups
- Polish, integrations, and extensive tracking config
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 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) + Postgres and a vanilla JS tracking snippet. In scope: (1) produce a <2KB tracking script that sends anonymous pageview and custom-event POSTs to /collect, (2) implement an Express collector that validates payloads and writes raw events and daily aggregates into Postgres, (3) implement REST endpoints to return aggregated metrics (pageviews, visitors, bounce rate) for a single site, (4) build a simple React single-page dashboard that displays metrics and time-series charts, (5) provide Docker Compose for local deployment and a managed-Postgres-ready env var config. Out of scope: funnels, session replay, heatmaps, teams, advanced attribution, and managed hosting. Include input validation, error handling, basic unit tests for collector and aggregation logic, and a short README with deployment steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
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 productUmami – Privacy-First Analytics Platform
- official docsUmami documentation
- open sourceumami-software/umami
- open sourceplausible/analytics
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
