[marcopicentini]

I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics, which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time to Beam Analytics now.

I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your success, other developers want to have it too.

Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in the short term because of your ego.

[mtlynch]

There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention.

I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here.

If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.

[trulykp]

Well said!

I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.

[capableweb]

One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a sub-section of the users of Plausible.

[rubenfiszel]

But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway.

We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.

[ecuaflo]

Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place?

[jacooper]

Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently breaking the AGPL license.

But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?

[paulgb]

Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white labeled instance of Plausible’s OSS?

[chronicom]

It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on Twitter if you are interested in following their journey (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird, Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix.

A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.

[zX41ZdbW]

Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.

[chronicom]

Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't have to worry about.

[pembrook]

…and plausible is a direct ripoff of Fathom analytics (design by Paul Jarvis).

A good rule of thumb: if you think something is original, chances are it’s because you’re just not very familiar with the space.

Ultimately, none of this matters. The goal of a product should be to help customers achieve the outcomes they want, not create something original.

[flurly]

Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam

[paulgb]

Thanks for the context. Looks like a cool product and (as someone who hates cookie banners) I'm excited to see more GDPR compliant providers.

[ents]

Not possible to self host though.

[spapas82]

Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license. You can even find instructions for self hosting here: https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting

Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.

[huhtenberg]

GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.