SMF·PLAUSIBLE
Can a prompt replace Plausible?
Analytics — privacy web analytics
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A lightweight pageview tracker — a small script, an ingest endpoint, a dashboard of visitors and top pages — is a real weekend build, and Plausible's own code is open source. What separates a personal build from the paid product is the same thing that separates it from self-hosting the real Plausible: bot filtering tuned over years, and fast queries once traffic gets real.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a small, cookie-free analytics tracker for a personal site: a tracking script under 2KB that sends a pageview beacon (path, referrer, screen size) with no cookies and no persistent visitor ID — compute a daily-rotating visitor hash server-side from the IP, user-agent, and a secret salt, and never store the raw IP. An ingest endpoint that does basic bot filtering by user-agent and writes events to a database. A password-protected dashboard showing unique visitors, pageviews, top pages, top referrers, and country breakdown for today/7-day/30-day windows, with a simple visitors-per-day chart. Support multiple sites via a site ID in the script. Compute a session's end after a period of inactivity and derive a bounce rate from that.
Do not build a full events/goals system or team accounts — those are real product surface. And be honest about scale: this tracker is sized for a personal site's traffic, not a business one. Once traffic gets real, the actual open-source Plausible project is self-hostable and already solves bot filtering and query performance at scale — that's the honest move past a certain point, not a bigger version of this script.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 bot filtering tuned over years of abuse patterns
- B.2 fast aggregate queries at real scale
- B.3 email reports and goal/funnel tracking
- B.4 GDPR compliance research already done
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: open-source core/hosting
Analytics has to be boring and reliable — people pay so pageview counting never becomes their problem, and so the privacy and compliance homework is already done.
Questions
Can I import my existing Plausible stats?
Plausible can export your stats as CSV, which gives you historical numbers to reference, but there's no way to import that history into this build's own database — it starts counting from zero going forward.
Will it work on my phone?
The dashboard is a responsive web page, so viewing your stats on a phone works fine. There's no mobile app, but analytics dashboards rarely need one.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting and a database, typically a few dollars a month — the tracking script itself is nearly free to run at personal-site traffic levels.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Bot filtering that's actually good. Distinguishing real visitors from the constant background noise of scrapers and bots is a cat-and-mouse game refined over years; a personal script's filtering will be cruder, and your numbers will be noisier for it.
Related tools
Receipt