Website Analytics for Indie Developers: What You Actually Need

You shipped the thing. Maybe it’s a SaaS, maybe it’s a dev tool, maybe it’s a blog that’s been sitting in a private repo for six months and you finally hit publish. First thing you do is add Google Analytics because that’s what everyone does.

Stop. You don’t need it. And it’s actively worse than the alternatives for your situation.

What you care about on launch day

I’ve launched enough side projects to know the drill. You post the link on Hacker News or Twitter or Reddit, and then you refresh your analytics dashboard compulsively for the next four hours. What are you actually looking for?

Is anyone visiting? That’s question one. Pageviews and some rough unique visitor number. You just want to know the link is getting clicks.

Where are they coming from? Your HN post, or the tweet, or that Reddit comment? Knowing which channel is driving traffic tells you where to engage.

What are they looking at? Are people bouncing from the homepage, or are they clicking through to your docs and pricing page? This tells you if the message is landing.

That’s it. Those three things. You do not need event tracking, audience segments, conversion funnels, or “explorations.” You need a number, a referrer list, and a top pages list.

Why GA4 is the wrong tool for this

GA4 was built for marketing teams at mid-size companies. It assumes you have someone whose job title includes the word “analytics.” As a solo dev:

The setup takes 10-20 minutes of configuring properties and data streams before you see a single number. On launch day, those minutes matter — you want data now.

The interface buries basic stats under layers of menus. Pageviews are under Reports, then Engagement, then Pages and screens, and only if you set up the right event parameters. I’ve watched experienced developers get lost in GA4.

Your developer audience uses ad blockers. Brave, uBlock Origin, Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection — they all block GA. The more technical your audience, the bigger the blind spot. You could be missing a third of your actual traffic. That’s not a rounding error.

And then there’s the consent banner. You spent hours polishing your landing page, and now it has a popup asking about cookies. Your developer audience sees google-analytics.com in their network tab and judges you a little. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

What actually works for indie projects

The analytics tool you want has four properties:

Instant setup. One script tag. Paste it in your layout. Start seeing data. No property configuration, no data streams, no waiting for data to “process.”

One-screen dashboard. Open it, see your traffic, close it, get back to work. If you’re clicking through tabs to find a pageview count, the tool is too complex for your use case.

Doesn’t scare away your audience. No cookies means no consent banner. Privacy-first means your visitors’ ad blockers don’t filter it out. Your Lighthouse score doesn’t tank because of a 45KB analytics payload.

Costs nothing or close to it. You’re building a side project. It might make money someday. Until then, paying $9-15/month for analytics is hard to justify. A free plan or a $5/month plan is a different conversation.

After the launch spike

Once the HN traffic fades (it always fades), your analytics needs get even simpler. Check once a week: is the trend going up, flat, or down? Where is organic traffic coming from? What pages are people finding?

If pages are getting traffic but nobody’s signing up, that’s a messaging problem. If nobody’s finding your site at all, that’s a distribution problem. Simple analytics tell you which problem you have without burying the signal in noise.

Pick something and move on

We built HushStats for this exact situation and we’d love you to try it. But honestly, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Pirsch, GoatCounter — they’re all better than GA4 for indie devs. Pick whichever one fits your budget, paste in the script tag, and get back to the part that actually matters: building your product.