most analytics tools keep every visitor's data forever. mine deletes all of it after 13 months.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless analytics tool. day 15 of 90, building in public.
the number
cloudline keeps about 13 months of history. every night, anything older gets deleted. no archive, no cold storage, no export-before-you-lose-it email. it just goes.
delete a site from your dashboard and the data goes immediately. there is no 30-day grace window to talk you out of it.
why a limit exists at all
a pageview in cloudline stores exactly four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. nothing else. the retention rule is the same instinct at a longer timescale. data you no longer need is a liability with no upside.
13 months is enough to compare this quarter against the same quarter last year. that is the only long-timescale question most small sites ever ask. anything older stops answering questions and starts being a promise you made to nobody.
the tradeoff, stated plainly
year-over-year-over-year doesn't exist. if you want to know what your traffic looked like three years ago, cloudline will not know. most tools will. i chose the cutoff over the archive.
some people will read this as a missing feature. i read it as the feature. an analytics tool that never forgets is an analytics tool that never has to answer why it remembers.
how it works in practice
the install is one line of javascript, under 2 kb, no cookies, no stored ips. you delete the line and tracking stops. up to 50 sites in one dashboard. traffic sources arrive grouped: search, social, newsletters, ai assistants included. revenue attribution is still coming soon, not shipped.
free while in early access. no card.
— om
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