Fathom Analytics

Analytics matters more than people think when you’re building marketing websites. I used Google Analytics for years. It’s powerful and it’s free, but free has a cost, and the data privacy stuff is a real problem when it’s a client’s site and not just yours. I’m normally a big Google guy. This is one of the worst Google products. When GA4 came out it got genuinely painful to use.

So I moved to Plausible. I don’t have much bad to say about it. Solid product, simple UI, easy to install, and it works on anything instead of just WordPress, which was the whole reason I went looking. The problem was never the product. It was the pricing. I wanted programmatic access through the API so I could spin up a new site as part of my build process instead of clicking around a dashboard. I don’t have a ton of pageviews. What I have is a lot of sites. The moment you go past 10 sites they want $168 a month to get to 50, and the traffic allowance barely moves. That math doesn’t work for me.

I looked at a few options, including Cloudflare’s Web Analytics, which is free and fine but only keeps about 30 days, so it can’t be your record. I landed on Fathom. Same price range as what I was already paying, five times the traffic, 50 sites instead of 10, and the full API is included instead of being a $99 a month add-on.

The part I actually care about: I run Fathom alongside my AIOS, and my own database holds all of it, the full history and everything going forward. Fathom does the collection, which is the hard part nobody should be building themselves, and their bot filtering is good. I pull it into my system through the API. That’s how I use most SaaS at this point. I’m not living in their dashboard, I’m using the back end so I don’t have to build the whole thing myself.