Best posts made by XCS

@marcusquinn Thanks a lot for the comments, really useful!

I have actually received several similar suggestions regarding the userTrack name. I thought about it for a long time, but for now I have no plans of changing it. A big reason is that when people are Googling for "user tracking" they will stumble upon userTrack, which is one of the most privacy-friendly solutions for "tracking" users (self-hosted, cookieless, hashed IPs, multiple privacy settings, etc.). This is in some way similar to getting "earthIsFlat dot com" and posting on it content that proves the earth is not flat.

Another reason why I am still using the name is because it's self-hosted, so the web administrator can actually name the user-facing scripts whatever he wants.

I agree that a more user-friendly name could help, but currently the existing brand power and SEO benefits make this change unlikely to happen.

I highly recommend looking at the EspoCRM, Wordpress, Matomo open-source, premium add-ons business-models

I have considered and tried many pricing models over the years. Working on userTrack for over 9 years I have also always watched other similar platforms and their business model and always debated whether going open-source would help or kill the project. For example, Matomo is really awesome and it's open-source, but their focus is NOT on the open-source part. Being a business, their focus is to attract users to their premium offering so their open-source version drops in quality/features (some core features are only available for the cloud plans for a very high cost).

Open-source is not free of cost for users, they pay you with their time, testing and feedback

This is true, but keep in mind that paying users also pay with their time, testing and feedback too.

Don't cut off that source of improvement, just get better at managing a public Git*** repo and issues, embrace the community spirit, and I'm sure you will have great success - including here

Doing open-source well is REALLY hard. Take Matomo for example, which is a huge organization, yet their repo has thousands of open issues and tens of unmerged Pull Requests. Although this seems like good activity, in the end I feel like it also means many human-hours of effort have been wasted trying to create, analyze, accept/reject all those suggestions. All this while the user-facing progress is overall slow and the platform starts to feel outdated.

I also recommend watching this great talk about the not-so-good parts of open-source.

I am not saying in any way that userTrack will never ever be open-sourced, but for my current goals with the project this is currently a no-go (working on userTrack as a shared/paid-source project for over 9 years has worked really well and most of the customers are extremely happy with the product). I want to mention that it's not about the money, it's mostly that switching userTrack to open-source would move my focus away from my envisioned end-goal for the product and self-hosting ecosystem.

I wouldn't consider anything with compiled or obfuscated code in though - and would spend 5 times the amount to have it decompiled and published

userTrack's source-code was actually entirely unobfuscated and visible up until v3 when I rewrote the entire application in TypeScript and React. Because those technologies require a building process, which means dev tools and maintaining a dev documentation, I realized that I wouldn't be able to provide a proper developer experience while focusing on improving the product. My goal now is to create an awesome product that just works, without having to fiddle with code (so the target audience also includes non-programmers).

That being said, the server side (PHP, MySQL) and tracking (JS tracker) source code of userTrack is completely visible and unobfuscated. The only obfuscated part is the JS of the interface (dashboard UI) only because changing it would require me to provide numerous extra development tools and write extensive documentation. My plan is to soon add a way to extend userTrack (eg. via plugins), so you can still customize the dashboard if you want but without having to learn and setup a complex dev environment.

Thanks again a lot for sharing your opinions, it's really useful to know how different communities have different opinions on how a product should be in order to be useful for them.

Website: https://www.usertrack.net/
Description: Self-hosted analytics platform with heatmaps, session recordings and A/B testing
Demo: https://dashboard.usertrack.net
Features:

• Visitor Analytics
• Heatmaps
• Events
• Session Recordings
• Segments
• A/B testing

@jdaviescoates No, it is not open-source, a license has to be purchased, but for the initial installation I do provide a 7-day trial that can be used in the Cloudron image, so you just install it with one click and then can test it for 7 days and can purchase a license afterwards.

With the free trial is also how I planned on publishing a public Docker image and now also I'm trying to get it on the DigitalOcean marketplace as an app (not sure if they accept trials/premium products, but I don't see why as it just makes it easier for the user to setup that specific app on their platform).

@micmc Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I have previously directly discussed this with someone at Cloudron about half a year ago and they were excited to have userTrack on the platform. Unfortunately I didn't find the time to package the app and now I am looking for someone with experience to help me with it, so I can do it right.

I am a bit confused by the personal attack, I have been involved in FOSS for a very long time and I even answer the question of why userTrack isn't open-source on the pricing page, the quote from there:

I have strongly considered open-sourcing userTrack but keeping it license-based allows me to work full-time on it and improve it at much faster pace than most of the open-source software. By being focused on the self-hosted aspect (instead of providing a "hosted" solution) my interests are alinged with yours: make userTrack easy to install, easy to update and highly-performant on any server.

If you consider the price of userTrack to be high you are most likely not in the target audience.

7 days to try an analytics software is ahem... ridiculous

I agree, 7 days to try an analytics platform is very little. Previously there was no trial. userTrack is self-hosted, the main pushback with self-hosted software is the thought the installation takes a long time or that the product does not work on your environment. By providing a free trial customers can try the installation process and check compatibility with their configurations without paying anything or giving any personal details.

I am not sure what deal you are referring to or why SaaS platforms are mentioned. userTrack is a self-hosted analytics platform, you install it on your own server and own all your data forever. By providing a Cloudron app it will provide users with an additional way of easily installing it, which means userTrack users are also referred to Cloudron through the installation docs.