Show HN: Building My Own Google Analytics for $0
3 months ago
- #Tracking
- #Google Analytics
- #Web Development
- Building a custom Google Analytics alternative for $0.
- Understanding the basic architecture: User's Browser → Tracking Script → Backend API → Database → Dashboard.
- Reverse engineering Google Analytics reveals it sends collect requests on almost every event.
- Problem 1: CORS preflight requests doubling the number of HTTP calls. Solution: Use query parameters instead of JSON body.
- Problem 2: Bots skewing analytics data. Solution: Two-layer bot detection (client-side and server-side) with Cloudflare Worker for edge filtering.
- Problem 3: Session management. Solution: Client-side session tracking using sessionStorage.
- Problem 4: Tracking route changes in SPAs. Solution: Intercepting History API calls.
- Final architecture includes Cloudflare CDN for the tracking script, Cloudflare Worker for bot detection, Backend API, MongoDB Atlas, and a Dashboard.