nullitics

After a month of hard work - nullitics.com is up and running! One can log in with Google or Github, add his websites and watch the numbers grow!

Well, not really. Payments are disabled, so for most people is a rather useless SaaS for now - they all would get stuck at the payment page. But I personally can log in and watch my own sites. In fact, open-source nullitics has been collecting data for me all this time, it has been really flawless and I can now see all this data on nullitics.com!

Yes,I want to be fair to my users and let them use open-source version if they are unable to pay.

I started https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics - a small Go library that one can embed or run as a standalone web service to get the world cheapest analytics without any databases, external dependencies or complexity.

Yet, it does its main job - it can tell how many visitors are on the web site, where do they come from, what device they are using. It all works even if the user has JavaScript disabled. And it is flexible enough to be customized to use for something more than web pages (mobile apps, IoT, custom events).

Fortunately, at the beginning of the year many people ask "What are you working on?". I have been replying - "Nullitics". A couple of HN readers wrote me personal emails saying that they are happy to pay now, and asking to let them know about the launch.

I think there is a demand. Now, is 1€/month a really low bar? Can I make the SaaS as lean as possible and run it as cheaply as possible?

The idea of an affordable, privacy-focused web analytics has been bothering me for a long time. There are free analytics platforms (Google, Hotjar), but they don't really respect users' privacy. There are privacy-focused platforms (SimpleAnalytics, Plausible etc), but many users are not ready to pay 20€/month for just getting a number of visitors on their site. Self-hosted analytics is a nice compromise, but requires certain skills, which many people (designers, writers) may not have.

So I thought - this time I can start and finish a tiny SaaS that would be profitable even when it costs user 1€/month. Now I need to think if that's a crazy idea or not.