the easiest way to kill a small analytics tool is to add everything.
someone asks for countries, you add countries. someone wants email reports, you add email reports. six months later you have a dashboard with forty tabs and a cookie banner, which is exactly what you started out hating.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer. cloudline is my cookieless google analytics alternative, and this is day 11 of 90 building in public. the series so far was about what i track without cookies. today it's about what i refused to build.
the refusals that made the product
cookies first. the whole premise. cloudline sets none, stores no ips, and keeps nothing on your visitors' devices.
then user agents. every browser sends a string naming your os and device, and analytics tools read it for free device stats. it's also a fingerprint ingredient, so i banned it. the dashboard works out mobile, tablet, and desktop from screen width instead. i wrote about that yesterday.
the refusals still on the list
revenue attribution is coming soon. it sits on the homepage with a "coming soon" tag and on the roadmap page with the honest note that those numbers don't exist yet. i could ship a version that guesses revenue from pageviews. people ask for it. a guessed revenue number is worse than no revenue number, because someone will make a pricing decision on it.
countries, operating systems, browsers: also on the roadmap. the dashboard groups traffic today without knowing where anyone lives or what they run, because knowing that was never required for the question it answers. when those arrive, they arrive without changing the four things a pageview stores: page, referrer, screen size, time.
core web vitals and weekly email reports are on the same list. all useful, and all still sitting on it, because each one is a promise about data collection that i want to make once and keep.
why no is the product
here's the mechanism people miss. every feature you refuse is consent logic your users never need. a tool that stores four things needs no cookie banner. a tool that stores forty things needs a legal department.
the product isn't the dashboard. the dashboard is what the refusals leave behind.
the honest limit
saying no is easy to write about and hard to keep doing. users will ask for all of this, reasonably, and every one of them is a real need. the line i'm drawing: nothing ships until i can collect it without asking the visitor to agree to being collected.
if that ever stops being true, the whole premise breaks. so it stays the rule.
one line, under a minute
if you haven't installed yet:
<script src="https://trycloudline.space/tracker.js" data-site-id="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script>
takes under a minute. removing it is deleting the line.
cloudline is free for early users while i keep building it. cookieless analytics in one line of code.
— om yaduvanshi
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