Fair q! It's a one-time $9.99 Mac app, not a subscription. You get a fast photo browser, a full RAW editor (masks, AI denoise, HDR + panorama merge) and search that finds "red beanie" or text inside your photos. All of it runs on your Mac, nothing gets uploaded. Free 7-day trial 🙂

You don't have to! That's the point of Traks: it's free and open source. You only pay Cloudflare for usage, which is $0 for most small sites beyond the $5 Workers plan. And you get the cookie-free, no-banner setup Imants mentioned.

Thank you! If anything trips you up on Monday, reply here or open a GitHub issue and I'll take a look.

Thanks! It's one Iceberg table for all your sites, compacted automatically, so the table count never grows. R2 storage is cheap, and the first 10 GB is free. The real cost driver is event volume, and up to ~10M events a month it's about Cloudflare's $5 plan.

Fair worry. That's why it runs on Cloudflare: no server, no database to back up, nothing to patch. Install and updates are one click from traks.dev. If you don't want even that, a hosted analytics tool is the right call.

Agreed. Bots never count as visitors in Traks. They get their own tab, labelled search, AI, SEO, social or monitoring, so GPTBot reading your docs shows up as exactly that, not as a visitor.

Speaking for Traks: there's no catch. It runs in your Cloudflare account, so it costs me nothing per user and I never see your data. No selling data, no ads. If it ever makes money, it'll be a hosted version for people who don't want to run it themselves.

Thanks! Your Cloudflare point applies to Traks too: it only runs on Cloudflare. The upside is that your history is plain Iceberg/Parquet in your own R2 bucket, so the data isn't locked in, and most small sites fit Cloudflare's $5 plan.

Neither: Cloudflare's R2 SQL, their serverless engine over Iceberg tables in R2 Data Catalog. A Worker queries it over HTTP and the results are edge-cached. Today and live views skip it and read from a SQLite Durable Object per site.

Not a n00b question! GA has more depth. What you give up: cookie banners in the EU, your data living with Google, and a heavy script. Traks is cookie-free, the data sits in your own Cloudflare account, and your agent can query it directly over MCP.

감사합니다! Thanks for the thread, and for flagging the $5 Workers plan and the missing revenue feature. That's exactly right.

Both trackers are small. Traks is ~2 KB gzipped (I just measured it). The bigger difference is running it: Umami needs a server and a database you look after. Traks runs on Cloudflare, so there's nothing to patch, back up or scale.

Plausible CE is great. The main difference is what you run: CE is Docker with ClickHouse and Postgres on a server you maintain. Traks has no server. It's Workers, Durable Objects and R2 in your Cloudflare account, installed and updated in one click.

Fair points for a paid product. Traks isn't undercutting anyone, though: it was free and MIT before DataBull launched. There's nothing to charge for, since you pay Cloudflare, not me. And if I disappear tomorrow, the code and your data are still yours.

Thanks for the shoutout, Ekene! I think people will still pay, just for what they can't easily build themselves: hosting, support, someone on call. Traks is free because it runs on your own Cloudflare. If I ever charge, it'll be for running it for you, not for features.

Fair, if revenue by source is what you need, Traks isn't there yet, and I said so in the post. Stripe attribution is next on the roadmap. If you'd like a ping when it ships, I'll let you know.

Glad it's working for you! Analytics is data you should own outright. If it runs in your account, you should be able to read every line of code that touches it. Being open also means people can fix what bugs them instead of waiting on me.

Thank you, that means a lot 🙏 Honest answer: it's built on Cloudflare pieces (Durable Objects, Pipelines, R2 SQL), so a Docker version would mean a rewrite. Running it in your own Cloudflare account is the self-hosting story for now.

Just one: a single events table, with automatic compaction. You pay once, when an event comes in, not every month after. Up to ~10M events a month it's basically Cloudflare's $5 base plan. Stored history on R2 adds cents.