How did you build customer-facing analytics?
I have a dashboard, in eventOne, that shows some analytics such as unique users, pageviews, registration revenue, etc.. I use Keen.io to power those analytics. Keen is a very robust event tracking platform that made it possible for me to build that dashboard with their API in about a day.
Last year they increased their pricing from pay-as-you-go to starting at $150/mo. I just found out that they, once again, increased their pricing to starting at $299/mo (for context, my MRR is $410). I have a contract with them for $30/mo but it doesn't last much longer. And I have doubts that I will be able to renew it for a reasonable amount.
So that brings me to my question:
How did you implement customer-facing analytics? Did you ad-hoc build queries for each metric/chart? Did you use some platform like Keen? Did you use some open-source software? Or something else?
For context, my tech stack is MongoDB, Node.js, and GraphQL.
Just found this, about to try it out: https://www.verbdata.com/
I have not built customer-facing analytics myself, but here is what I would do if I found myself in that situation:
-Building your own queries sounds painful. You'd have to roll your own storage and queries, which are two additional systems to worry about. Every time you wanted to add a new user-facing dashboard, that becomes a new feature in itself. You have to begin to worry about query definitions, in some cases. Counting pageviews is easy. Counting visits is more nuanced, and your customers will inevitably get curious about your definitions, which creates a support obligation. All of that slows down your progress.
-Continuing to build off an existing commercial solution prevents those concerns. I would look at additional web analytics systems and keep a close eye out for what tools allow query over API inclusive of user segmentation. That allows for quickly fetching (or pre-fetching!) a set of queries like "pageviews, filtered to $CUSTOMER_A". GA is the first tool that comes to mind, but I'd be surprised if it were the only one.
Here are a few things that might help
If you only have a few customers, then something like Klipfolio, Cyfe, Dasheroo, Geckoboard, Domo, etc might suffice. The pricing is different: some limit dashboards ... some limit number of users. I think even Google Analytics allows for creation of 100 users (they can increase the limit if you ask them).
If you have a lot more, then here is a UI kit. It has one for the kind of dashboard you are looking for: https://janlosert.com/store/dashboard-ui-kit-3.html
Login to Capiche.com and see what others are paying for keen. As a general rule, you can always negotiate better around end of quarter.
It isn't the dashboard UI that I need. It is the event tracking/aggregation API that I need. Keen.io doesn't provide the dashboard UI itself. They do the event tracking and have a robust API for querying that data. Plus some SDKs to make creating charts from it really easy (essentially a wrapper around d3.js).
I'll have to try out Capiche.com. I remember hearing about it a while ago.
I know Keen does a lot more. I wanted to say that the UI Dashboard could be one of the things that might help. Should have explained better.