Launching Loglesk

Six months ago, I started working on a tiny side project. I needed a really simple alternative to Google Analytics, which didn’t meet my needs for several reasons. As I also work a full-time job as a developer at a big tech company, it took quite a long time. In fact, the prototype was ready after 2 months, but I decided not to launch it right away. Although the product itself is quite simple, I wanted to refine it and make sure it works as it should. I’ve been spending a lot of my time on that.

Loglesk is still early. However, it’s already running on several websites. Not many for now, but it’s used by a few real companies. I’m receiving a lot of positive feedback. As of today, it is publicly available to everyone.

Idea

My idea was to create an alternative to Google Analytics that would be simple, respect user privacy, and be more friendly than existing solutions. Also, it must be reliable enough to be suitable for serious use. I also didn’t want it to be as expensive as other available tools of this type.

My most important goals:

• Don’t use cookies
  No consent management and legal compliance issues.

• Don’t store personally identifiable information (PII)
  No IP addresses, no fingerprints, no cross-site tracking. Fully compliant with GDPR, PECR, and other privacy regulations.

• Simple and clear UI
  One-page, minimalist dashboard that delivers just the important insights and makes it easy to understand traffic at a glance.

• Blazingly fast
  Built for speed – both in how fast the dashboard loads and how little impact it has on the tracked site’s performance.

• Lightweight JS snippet
  A smaller script means faster loading times, better performance scores (e.g. Core Web Vitals), and less bandwidth usage.

• Hosted in the EU
  To ensure strong data protection standards and full compliance with the GDPR of the European Union.

• Open-source
  Loglesk is intended to be free software and to be easily customizable to individual needs. Giving users full control over how the analytics are run (self-hosted or managed).

All these goals have been achieved so far. I just haven’t had time to release publicly the source code and self-hosted version yet. I still need to think about what form to make the self-hosted Loglesk available so that implementation would be as easy and fast as possible.

It was also important for me to support personal/hobby websites and blogs that don’t get much traffic by including a free tier (<10k monthly hits). I guess it shouldn’t be a problem in the long run. Loglesk doesn’t have to earn a lot of money. I don’t really care about that because I make a living from a full-time job. So I only need enough money to maintain the infrastructure. And it turns out that the costs of maintaining the infrastructure are lower than I expected. Of course, as a solo founder, I don’t have enough time to provide technical support for free users. For more traffic, there’s a reasonable pricing depending on the amount of traffic. I hope this will provide funds for the sustainable development of the project.

What’s next?

For now, the product has all the necessary features that work well. However, there’s still a lot of work to be done. I’m currently working on adding some new features like custom events and funnels. I also focus on writing good documentation to simplify the implementation of the product. My priority is also to publish the open-source, self-hosted version of Loglesk, which will happen soon.

I’m excited about building a tool that people are happy to use. And at the same time, making the internet a bit less “Google-y” too.

Check out the live demo of the Loglesk dashboard.

— by Tom Antok