SMF·FATHOM-ANALYTICS
Can a prompt replace Fathom Analytics?
Analytics — privacy web analytics
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A privacy-respecting analytics script — pageview beacons, no cookies, a small dashboard with top pages and referrers — is a real weekend build, and there's nothing conceptually hard about it. What the subscription mainly buys is managed infrastructure, uptime, and someone else's privacy-compliance posture.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a small self-hosted analytics service: a tracking script under a couple of kilobytes that sends a pageview beacon (path, referrer, screen width) with no cookies and no persistent identifier. Count unique visitors without storing personal data — hash the IP address and user agent together with a salt that rotates daily, then discard the raw values immediately. Filter obvious bots with a simple user-agent blocklist before counting. Build a dashboard showing pageviews, unique visitors, top pages, and top referrers over a few time windows, protected by a single access token rather than a full user-account system. Keep raw events only for a short retention window, rolling them up into permanent daily aggregates on a schedule, and prune old raw events automatically.
Do not build scheduled email reports, team seats, or billing — one site, or a short list of sites in a config file, is the honest scope. Be plain in the README that this is polite, privacy-respecting analytics, not a formal legal-compliance product.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 managed infrastructure and uptime
- B.2 someone else's privacy and compliance posture
- B.3 scheduled email reports
- B.4 support
- B.5 billing convenience
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: hosting/compliance positioning
People pay to avoid maintaining analytics infrastructure and writing their own privacy documentation — not because cookieless pageview counting is technically hard.
Questions
Can I import my existing Fathom Analytics data?
Not really — Fathom doesn't offer a structured export of raw analytics data, only summary reports. Historical numbers stay in Fathom; this build starts counting fresh from the day you add the script.
Will it work on my phone?
The dashboard is a responsive web page, fine for checking stats on a phone, but there's no dedicated mobile app.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting, a domain, and a database, typically under ten dollars a month — genuinely cheap since analytics data is small and simple to store.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Someone else's compliance posture. Fathom actively maintains privacy-law positioning and documentation you can point at if asked; a self-hosted script is functionally similar but carries none of that maintained legal framing.
Related tools
Receipt