I replaced a $130/mo analytics stack with one $20 dashboard. Here's what happened.

My old setup:

• GA4 for traffic (free but I spent 2+ hours/week trying to find anything)
• Hotjar for heatmaps ($80/mo)
• A Google Sheet for attribution (priceless headache)

Three tools. Three logins. Three JavaScript snippets on my site. And the data never matched across any of them.

The worst part? I still couldn't answer the most basic question: which traffic source brings people who actually pay?

GA4 told me where visitors came from. Hotjar showed me what they clicked. The spreadsheet tried to connect the two. It never worked.

So I spent 6 months building a single dashboard that does all three. Traffic analytics, heatmaps, session replay, and revenue attribution in one place. No cookies, EU-hosted, one script tag.

It's live at zenovay.com and I have a handful of paying users.

Honest lessons from building it:

1. The hardest feature wasn't the analytics. It was session replay. Recording DOM changes without destroying page performance is genuinely hard.

2. Nobody cared about my feature list. The first user who paid told me: "I just want to know which blog post makes me money." That one sentence reshaped my entire positioning.

3. Marketing is 5x harder than building. I've sent 150+ DMs, had posts removed by Reddit spam filters, and learned that the founders with 500 followers are the ones who actually reply.

4. Pricing at $20/mo feels like a sweet spot for indie founders but I'm honestly not sure. It's way cheaper than stacking tools but some people still expect analytics to be free because of GA4.

Question for this community: how do you compete with free? GA4 is objectively terrible but it's $0. How do you convince someone to pay for something when the alternative costs nothing?