TellWright
Did anybody actually use the thing you built?
Fact is, there are already plenty of analytics tools, and I probably didn't need to write another one. But the ones I looked at were either an entire marketing suite when all I wanted was a number, or they set cookies on my visitors, and I wasn't willing to do that just to find out whether anybody's looking at my site. So I wrote this instead. It counts how many people showed up, not who they were. No cookies, and no ad network gets a look at your traffic on the way past.
It works. It's just not open yet.
It's running right now, and it counted your visit to this page a moment ago. It counts my other apps, too. What it doesn't have is a way for you to sign up, because I haven't built that part yet.
Tell me when it's open →How you'd wire it up
Install the package and call it once. Then point a path on your own domain at me, using the proxy in front of your app.
That second part is the one that matters. Your visitors' browsers only ever talk to your domain, so there's no third-party request for an ad blocker to catch, no CORS, and no extra connection to open. Your proxy hands it to me out of sight.
Which does mean you need a proxy you control, and it has to be CloudFront or Cloudflare. That's where I get the visitor's real IP address, and without it I drop the event rather than guess. If your app lives somewhere you can't put one of those in front of, then TellWright is not for you. Better you find that out now than after you've signed up.
So how does it know who's who?
Every day gets its own secret. When an event arrives I hash that secret together with the visitor's IP and browser, and that's the identifier. The IP itself I throw away immediately. At midnight UTC that day's secret stops being used, and at 00:30 UTC it's deleted. After that, every identifier built from it stops meaning anything.
So you find out how many people came and what they looked at. You don't find out who they were. Neither do I.
Now the part where I tell you what it can't do
Retention, for visitors who never sign in. Did last week's crowd come back? I can't tell you. Yesterday's identifiers don't exist anymore.
Now you may be thinking, other tools answer that question just fine. Some of them do. They manage it by keeping something on the visitor's machine that lasts, which is the thing I built this to avoid. I'd rather tell you I don't know.
For signed-in users, retention works the way you'd expect. Real account, real answer.
A few things this is definitely not
Not error monitoring. Your cloud provider already does that, and does it better.
Not a data warehouse. Raw events stick around 180 days, and then they don't.
And it's not a paste-this-snippet product. If that's what you want, there are good ones out there. This isn't trying to be them.