SMF·SIMPLE-ANALYTICS
Can a prompt replace Simple Analytics?
Analytics — privacy web analytics
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Cookie-free pageview tracking with daily rollups and a simple dashboard is a real weekend build — the pattern is now well-established across several entries in this catalogue. What the subscription mainly buys is hosted privacy positioning, managed reliability, and someone else's support.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a privacy-first analytics service for your own sites: a tracking script under a kilobyte, with no cookies, that sends path, referrer, and screen width, plus a daily-salted hash of IP and user agent for unique-visitor counting — the salt rotates every day so nothing is traceable across days. Keep raw hits for a short window, then aggregate them nightly into permanent daily rollups per site (pageviews, uniques, top pages, top referrers, device split) and delete the expired raw data. Support simple custom events fired from the tracking snippet. Build a per-site dashboard behind basic authentication: a trend chart, pages and referrers tables, and a date-range picker. Filter obvious bots by user-agent, and support an opt-out flag so your own visits don't get counted. Add CSV export per site and month.
Do not build funnels, session replay, or multi-user access — this is a personal, single-operator tool. Uptime is your responsibility now; there's no managed infrastructure behind it.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 managed hosting and uptime
- B.2 ready-made privacy and legal positioning
- B.3 bot filtering tuned over time
- B.4 scheduled reports
- B.5 dedicated support
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: hosting/compliance positioning
People pay for low-maintenance analytics they can point to confidently in a privacy policy — not because cookie-free pageview counting is technically hard.
Questions
Can I import my existing Simple Analytics data?
Simple Analytics can export your stats as CSV for reference, but there's no way to import that history into this build's own rollups — it starts counting fresh from the day you switch the tracking script.
Will it work on my phone?
The dashboard is a responsive page, fine for checking stats on a phone. There's no dedicated app, but a simple analytics dashboard rarely needs one.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting and a database, typically a few dollars a month — genuinely cheap, since aggregated analytics data stays small.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Ready-made privacy positioning. Simple Analytics maintains its own legal and compliance documentation you can point to when asked; a self-hosted script is functionally similar in what it collects but carries none of that maintained framing.
Related tools
Receipt