I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc.
I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front page of HN I blew through their free tier in less than a day.
I wish there was something very basic that had a more generous free tier. At the moment my site literally apologises for using GA.
Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to hear someone is using what I've built.
Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a blog that gets less than <50k views per year" :)
There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up).
About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN): even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours - that way you won't lose data during traffic spikes.
Seems like there's a bit of exaggeration here. "Not willing to pay" != "not willing to pay 10+€/month for 30 distinct semi-random numbers each month". There are plenty of people willing to pay low prices (comparable to a barely warm cup of some really bad coffee) for analytics to help them make decisions.
Imagine, you write one blog post per month. How much would you pay if I told you which of your blog posts this year has been the most popular one, and on which social media it got the most attention? 120€? Unlikely. Then what do you think would be the fair price of this information?
Check out GoatCounter (http://goatcounter.com/). It's what I use for my personal blog, and it also has a free tier for non-commercial users (though I'd still recommend donating so they can stick around). They even have a no JS way to integrate tracking, as all I really care about is how many ppl are reading my blog.
I use Matomo, it runs on my home server, its open-source. Pretty sure you could run it on a Pi. There's a docker container that you can spin up in a few minutes.
Seconded - set up on a project instance last weekend in about 5 minutes, and it has been chugging along swimmingly since! And they’ve been doing it for a long time, Piwik was great even before the rebrand.
I am currently working on exactly this! I have always been dreaming of a low-cost, zero-effort web analytics.
So far I have made an open source library/service, I've been using it for my blog and a few other sites for over two months. It is available at https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics. You can see the example dashboard (fed with real data) at https://nullitics.com/dashboard/zserge.com. I'm now collecting all sorts of feedback from the early adoperts.
For the cloud version I decided to go with 1€/month, and I have often been criticised for choosing such a low price. However, I believe that I would rather be at a lower profit, but help bloggers, hackers and other who want such a tool.
I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front page of HN I blew through their free tier in less than a day.
I wish there was something very basic that had a more generous free tier. At the moment my site literally apologises for using GA.