The Indie Hacker's Guide to Privacy-First Analytics

You're shipping fast. You're watching your numbers obsessively. You're building in public. The last thing you need is a six-tab analytics setup that takes an afternoon to configure and requires a cookie banner that makes your landing page feel like a corporate compliance form.

Google Analytics is the default answer, but it's built for enterprise marketing teams — not solo founders with a side project getting its first hundred users. Here's why Beam fits the indie hacker workflow better, and how to get it running in under 60 seconds.

Why GA is overkill for side projects

GA4 gives you 200+ reports, a data model built around "events" and "parameters", and a setup wizard that takes 30 minutes if you've done it before. For a side project, you need to know: how many people visited today, where did they come from, and did they click the signup button?

GA also has a GDPR problem. It uses cookies, sends data to US servers, and legally requires you to show a consent banner to EU visitors — even if you have no EU users yet. That banner kills conversions. Indie hackers often skip the banner (illegally) or accept the conversion hit. Neither is great.

And here's the thing that most people don't realize: if you're collecting personal data from EU users without a lawful basis, the fine isn't just theoretical. Small companies have been fined. The GDPR applies to solo founders too.

GDPR concerns for small products

The moment you have a user in the EU, GDPR applies. It doesn't matter if you're a one-person operation, if you're pre-revenue, or if you've never heard of the supervisory authority in your country. The obligations are real.

The safe path for indie hackers: use analytics that collects no personal data at all. No cookies, no IP addresses, no fingerprinting. If you're not collecting personal data, GDPR's consent requirements don't apply. No banner needed.

Beam collects only what you actually need: page path, referrer, country (from IP geolocation — the IP is never stored), device type, and browser. That's it. No user IDs, no cross-site tracking, no persistent identifiers.

60-second setup

Paste one line into your <head>:

<script defer src="https://beam-privacy.com/js/beam.js" data-site-id="YOUR_SITE_ID"></script>

That's the entire installation. No npm package, no build step, no environment variable, no config file. Works on Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, a VPS — anywhere you can edit your HTML.

After you paste it, open your dashboard and reload your page once. You'll see the first pageview appear in real time.

Using goals to track signups and conversions

Pageviews alone tell you how many people showed up. Goals tell you how many did what you wanted them to do.

In Beam, you define goals by URL pattern. Want to track signups? Set a goal for /signup/success (or wherever you redirect after signup). Want to track pricing page clicks? Set a goal for /pricing. Every time that URL is visited, the goal fires.

For SPAs (React, Next.js, Svelte, Vue), Beam auto-detects route changes using the History API, so goals based on virtual URLs work without any extra configuration.

You can also fire a goal manually from JavaScript:

window.beam?.goal('Signup button clicked')

This is useful when the conversion doesn't involve a page navigation — like clicking a "Get started" button on a landing page, or completing a multi-step form.

Building in public with your public stats URL

Indie hackers love building in public — sharing MRR, user counts, and growth milestones. Beam gives you a public stats URL you can share with your audience so they can see your traffic in real time without needing an account.

To enable it: go to your site settings, turn on "Public dashboard". You'll get a URL like beam-privacy.com/public/YOUR_SITE_ID that anyone can view.

Drop it in your Indie Hackers profile, your Twitter/X bio, or your "About" page. Readers can see real traffic data, not a curated screenshot. It's a trust signal — and it makes your "building in public" posts more credible.

Free to start, scales with you

Beam's free tier covers 50,000 pageviews/month — more than enough for early-stage side projects. Most indie hackers can run indefinitely on the free plan.

When you grow past that, Pro is $5/month (or $50/year). That's less than a Hacker News Show HN post's worth of users costs you in Vercel bandwidth. And there are no seats, no team limits, no feature gates behind higher tiers — one price, everything included.

Ship fast. Know your numbers. Skip the GDPR headaches.

Beam is free for up to 50,000 pageviews/month. One script tag. No cookies. No consent banner. Works everywhere.

Start for free → See a live demo →