What does HackerNews think of pirsch?

Pirsch analytics is a great one https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

You can take a look at Pirsch Analytics [0], which I am a co-founder of. We take privacy very seriously, that is why the core of Pirsch is open-source [1].

[0] https://pirsch.io/

[1] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

I build a logging library for Go, because I couldn't find one that logs to stdout AND stderr. If you used a logging lib on GCP for example, all log output went into the same pile of junk and it was hard to find "real" errors: https://github.com/emvi/logbuch

Then there is "null", also because I couldn't find one that got both, marshalling to JSON and be able to store null values in db: https://github.com/emvi/null

And finally, our "flagship" open-source project Pirsch, an embedded library for web analytics: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

A few months ago, I've started a similar analytics project [0], which I have now turned into a product [1] together with my co-founder. The difference to Panelbear is, that I've started this to be used on my personal website, so it was open-source right from the beginning and without the intention to make money. In fact, you can still use our core library for free (AGPL licensed).

When we looked at the other solutions out there, we saw that a lot of them offer a self-hosted version for free. Giving away whole products for free has become a trend I don't anticipate. You can be sure there is an open-source, free as in free beer replacement for almost anything, which makes it really hard to build a sustainable business. While you can generate some traction off of it, you also have to deal with people asking for free support, new features, bug fixes, and so on. I have quite a lot of open-source projects, one of them is a game server management web UI [2]. It breaks my heard every time I have to tell someone that I can't support their request. There are cases where it makes sense to have the product fully open-source of course, like an operating system, or anything that can be considered "infrastructure".

Writing software is difficult and it takes countless hours to build something useful that is non-trivial. If it's something a lot of people rely on, think about charging for it, instead of giving it away for free. But in the end it's your time after all.

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

[1] https://pirsch.io/

[2] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb

I've found the same issue. A lot of traffic will get blocked if you use a simple JavaScript integration. The solution is (obviously) to track from the backend and provide a simple dashboard for it. I've started building a library [0] written in Go, which I could integrate into my website and until the end of last year, it became a product (in beta right now) called Pirsch [1]. We offer a JS integration to onboard customers more easily, but one of the main reasons we build it is, that you can use it from your backend through our API [2]. We plan to add more SDKs and plugins (Wordpress, ...) to make the integration easier, but it should be fairly simple already.

I would love to hear feedback, as we plan to fully release it soon :)

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

[1] https://pirsch.io/

[2] https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration/

[Edit]

I forgot to mention my website, which I initially created Pirsch for. The article I wrote about the issue and my solution is here: https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

I'm working on an open-core product [0] right now, and an aspect I find missing in the article is that you can generate trust by showing how the internals work. This is especially beneficial if you work in an area like us. Of course, you need to make sure your license is set right and you need to think about where new features go, but it's a valid use-case.

[0] https://pirsch.io/ open-source core: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

You can check out the Pirsch Analytics core [0]. I'm the maintainer and can answer all your questions :) It probably contains most features you'll use when programming in Go. Take a look at the tracker.go for a concurrent collector. It also has a lot of parsing, a data model, database, http, public API, ... and UI is not required while learning Go I suppose.

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

It's important to set boundaries early on. I'm working on this analytics library [0] and this game server management app [1] at the moment.

I started the first one with my own website in mind and as it gained some popularity, decided to try to make a commercial product out of it. Instead of making everything open-source, I develop the platform closed-source and keep the core (this library) open-source, but set limits to what can be contributed and under what conditions. This isn't clearly communicated in the repo yet, but it helps to stay sane.

For the game server project, which is older, I see a lot of feature requests and small contributions, because people actually depend on it. But boy, the support requests drive my crazy sometimes. Even if you only have a hand full of users, they can get demanding some days, when a new DLC for the game is released for example. I really want to support it and keep it up-to-date, but I sometimes have to ignore them. This week someone asked me if I could support them setting it up as they had trouble making it work for their drivers. Turns out they're a professional e-sports team. As soon as I asked for compensation, they didn't write back (after sending them 4-5 emails, taking half an hour to write). This is when it gets frustrating...

I don't know how to fix the issue, but we, as open-source maintainers, should value our time.

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

[1] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb

I'm working on an open-source analytics lib [0] and I fully agree with the article that Cloudflare should either do it right, or not do it at all. Filtering bots is probably the hardest part and time consuming. There is no simple approach to solve the issue, but not doing it at all makes it worthless, especially for the price.

Hopefully their push will make the issue more prominent to website owners and help Google Analytics alternatives to grow.

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

Hello Hackers, we're working on a new product. A developer friendly analytics tool that respects the privacy of your website visitors. We will offer SDKs, an API, good documentation and more. The core is open-source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch (we will probably change the license).

Please sign up for our upcoming beta if you're interested. We plan to launch the beta at the end of this year and it will be completely free.