I built my own free MVP privacy-first analytics tool after running dozens of side projects

I'm a web developer and, like many of you here, I tend to run a lot of side projects and small websites.

Naturally, I want to keep track of the basics: how many visits a site gets and where visitors are coming from.

I used Google Analytics for a long time, but over the years it started to feel bloated and overly focused on tracking users for Google’s benefit. I tried some smaller, privacy-first alternatives, which I liked - but as soon as I wanted to track more than a few sites or keep data longer than 30 days, the cost quickly climbed into the hundreds of dollars per year.

At some point I thought: why not just dogfood this problem?

What I wanted was extremely simple: no accounts, no cookies, no tracking people. Just copy a script tag, paste it, and see pageviews.

So I built a small MVP called PageviewsOnline. It’s a privacy-first web analytics tool where stats are aggregated, public by default, and stored in the EU. It’s designed to be EU privacy compliant out of the box, so no cookie banners are needed.

The core ideas are

• Privacy-first & EU-based - it’s clear what data is collected and what is stored

• Simple - paste a script and it starts tracking pageviews automatically

• No accounts - I don’t want to handle PII, so the service is open by design

Site-level configuration in the future

This is not yet implemented, but I really want to steer away from user accounts and PII data. I don't this to be just another web analytics tool.

So, I'm thinking of something like an /analytics.json (similar to /robots.txt) (even a private/public key encrypted file) for per-site settings if a site owner wants to do some basic customizations.

The elephant in the room: Pricing

I know this project can't stay entirely free forever - hosting, storage, and bandwidth will add up. But the whole point of me starting this project was because I don't want to pay $9/month/side project - so I want this to be free or affordable as much as possible.

So right now I am thinking of (and it might change in the future):

• 5 years data retention no matter - No matter which features you choose, the data won't get deleted. This means you can upgrade or downgrade your site at any time, unlocking new features as needed without the fear of losing data along the road.

• One time payments - I don't want to lock consumers in with a silly monthly subscription model. I rather have a model that is similar to "Select the domain, pay $9, and the site is upgraded for a year. See you in one year.". After a year, you might not need the extra features, but maybe in year 3 you might want them again - No problem, the data is still there due to the 5 year data retention policy across the board.

I'm mainly looking for honest feedback at this stage

• If you run a small site or side project, would something like this be useful to you?

• Is there something obvious missing or something that would stop you from using it?

• Do you think this project and the core ideas behind it even feasible?

I'd really appreciate any genuine feedback to help me understand how to make this more useful for other side project owners.