# Build brief — a focused alternative to Plausible

> **Verdict:** Yes, for personal use · **Buildability:** 60/100 · **Category:** Analytics
> **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/plausible
> Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Plausible. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

## Context

**Plausible** — Simple privacy-friendly website analytics. It currently costs $9/mo.

Basic pageview/event analytics are easy, and Plausible's own code is open source; the paid value is hosted reliability, maintenance, and support.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Plausible that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.

## What you are building

Add a small JS tracker, collect pageviews/events, aggregate by path/referrer/country/device, and show a dashboard.

- Ingest a known data source, calculate a focused metric set, and render a useful dashboard.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

## Requirements

### Functional

- Hosted server.
- Database.
- Tracker script.
- Domain/SSL.
- Bot filtering.
- Backups.

### Non-functional

- Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
- Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.
- Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.
- Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.

## Implementation brief

Build me a privacy-first web analytics tool like Plausible (personal scale).
Requirements:

- A <2KB tracking snippet (vanilla JS, no cookies): sends pageview beacons with
  path, referrer, screen class, and a daily-rotating visitor hash computed
  server-side from IP + user-agent + a salt (never store raw IPs).
- An ingest endpoint that filters obvious bots by user-agent and writes to
  SQLite. One row per event; index on (site, date).
- A /dashboard (basic-auth from .env): unique visitors, pageviews, top pages,
  top referrers, and countries for today/7d/30d, with a visitors-per-day bar
  chart as inline SVG. Fast and clean, dark mode.
- Sessionization: a visit ends after 30 idle minutes; compute bounce rate.
- Multi-site support via a site id in the snippet.
- Node or Python, one process. Honest note in the README: at serious traffic,
  self-host the real Plausible instead · this is for personal sites.

## Delivery standard

- Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.
- Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.
- Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.
- Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.
- Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.
- Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.
- Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.
- Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.

## Acceptance criteria

- [ ] A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.
- [ ] The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.
- [ ] Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.
- [ ] The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.
- [ ] Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.
- [ ] No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.

## Non-goals

Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:

- Battle-tested bot filtering.
- Fast queries at millions of pageviews.
- Email reports, funnels, goal tracking.
- GDPR homework done for you.
- Reliability at the vendor's scale is an operations problem, not a prompt.
- Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.

## What you still own after launch

- Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
- Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
- Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.

## Risk

**High consequence.** Use this as a prototype or personal aid. Keep a qualified human and an established provider in the loop for consequential decisions.

Editorial confidence in this assessment: high. No independent one-shot implementation is linked yet.

## Prior art

Working open-source software you can read, fork, or borrow from before starting:

- [plausible/analytics](https://github.com/plausible/analytics) — Plausible itself is open source — self-host it
- [umami](https://github.com/umami-software/umami) — lightweight self-hosted analytics

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Generated by [Can It Be Vibe Coded?](https://www.canitbevibecoded.com) · Full report: https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/plausible