Fathom Analytics Blog

Woah this thread is packed. Most of these companies didn’t exist when we started Fathom back in 2018, so it’s great to see how the privacy-first analytics space is thriving.

I’m Jack Ellis, the cofounder of https://usefathom.com. We’re a two person, self-funded company from Canada. Our software is used in projects by companies like IBM, GitHub, Tuple, Tailwind and lots of other awesome companies.

You shouldn’t use Fathom if you flinch at $14/m for a highly available service. We’re self-funded, priced to be sustainable long term, and we don’t guess on privacy law.

Recently, we launched a feature called EU Isolation following the Schrems II ruling (where Max Schrems sued Facebook). Long story short, if you’re using analytics and are passing your EU website visitors personal data (IP & User agent) to US-controlled cloud servers (even if they’re located in the EU), you’re violating the GDPR. Well with Fathom, we use both EU infrastructure and US infrastructure, but we automatically route all your EU visitors through German-owned infrastructure, and hash all personal data there, meaning your EU website visitors personal data will NEVER touch our core US infrastructure. This approach was put together with our Canadian and EU lawyers, and hasn’t been seen before in the analytics space. Lots of companies run on “EU servers”, but they’re controlled by US cloud providers and subject to FISA. This means they’re not GDPR compliant.

We don’t guess on legal matters, and we don’t cheap…

As a small company using one of the providers (https://usefathom.com/) it offers us choice. We don't want to build and run our own analytics and we don't need the vast features of a Google Analytics or similar either. Even without the privacy benefit the set metrics we get now acceptable. We don't have, e.g. a growth manager who needs to report these, investors who question the or make decisions when one metric looks off. Legitimacy didn't come up once during our migration and we didn't look too closely to compare to our previous provider (Google Analytics). It's not the core of your questions but there's usecases where less metrics, less accuracy is good enough.

Personally I have a background in metrics and reporting tools. I've been tasked to find and explain 0.3% differences between two reports or have cookie related (or timezone related) code getting reviewed by other engineers at previous companies. With millions of dollar at stake, Powerpoint meetings or investor or financial documention it makes sense to question every definition and the whole data pipeline.

> Coolness over effectiveness? What's all the fuss really about?

Ok, I admit, there's a bit of coolness factor. Paying $25/month to a small bootstrapped company (with a great podcast) beats feeding data to an ever growing global player (Google).

Hey Anthony,

I really like your product. It's crazy fast, might solve one of my issue, is super simple to use, and the UI is gorgeous.

I've a few questions though:

- how do you compare to other privacy focused analytics tools, such as https://usefathom.com/ or https://simpleanalytics.com/?

- it seems like you just launched your SaaS a couple of weeks ago. Why didn't you launch it earlier by removing some not strictly necessary/MVP features, such as the security login emails, the ability to manage multiple websites, a less scalable but simpler architecture ... ?

- how much time have you spent developing the product? I've been working on my personal SaaS for more than one year, planning to launch it in the next few weeks. I'm still working at my 4/5 full time job, and I really wonder how you managed to deliver this beautiful product while still working fulltime. That would be a wonderful opportunity for blog article BTW.

Great work!

Wondering how people feel about analytics on small sites such as these? Including a Google Analytics tag seems to go against the ethos of such a site, but a lot of people like to know who is visiting their blog and so including some sort of analytics should be an option.

Self hosting seems to be a decent tradeoff. Analytics services like Fathom [0], which provides a free, self-hosted solution, let you track basic statistics about your site without the data being siphoned off to some company. I have seen discussion around whether the use of analytics should even be necessary, but I feel like that's a separate conversation :)

[0] https://usefathom.com

> Edit: The example blog also loads js, despite the "no javascript" claim. Like: <script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" data-site="WKWMFTPV" defer></script>. Perhaps that's not a default thing, but it seems odd to link to an example blog that doesn't match the sales pitch.

Seems like this is loading Fathom analytics: https://usefathom.com/

Probably safe to turn off, as uBlock Origins and other ad blocking solutions would, depending on your settings. So I guess in a way the site itself works just fine without JS enabled and doesn't require it, but the authors have chosen to add analytics to see who uses their site, then.

Yes, you should absolutely not be using Google Analytics. They don't need more data, your users don't want to see cookie banners and most of you really don't need 99% of the data that you can filter through...

I can't recommend Fathom (https://usefathom.com) enough. They have a huge focus on privacy-first tracking. You don't need to show a cookie banner and you can still track events etc.

If you want $10 credit for signing up, use https://usefathom.com/james but otherwise, https://usefathom.com

Seriously, Google Analytics sucks. Use anything other than that.