Analytics · checked 2026-10-19Can I vibecode Fathom Analytics?
YES· one-shottable
Fathom's core is a collector endpoint, a daily-rotating visitor hash, a SQLite or Postgres table of hits and a dashboard of top pages, referrers and countries. An agent builds that in one sitting, and open projects such as Umami and GoatCounter already prove the shape. What you give up is hosting that absorbs traffic spikes, bot filtering from Fathom's own data, and first-party script domains that dodge ad blockers. For one personal site on a small server that matters little.
$15/moprice
$180you'd save a year
one sittingbuild time
—people replaced it
What you need on hand.
DifficultyIntermediate · Some system setup or keys.
TimeAn evening, plus DNS and a server for the public address
- Claude Code, Codex or CursorAny of them can run the prompt.
- Node.js 22better-sqlite3 compiles a native module, so build tools must be installed.
- A small server and a domainCaddy fetches the HTTPS certificate for you.
- A country database fileDB-IP Lite downloads without an account; MaxMind GeoLite2 needs a free signup.
Before you buildFathom has no free hosted plan. Umami and GoatCounter are free to self-host, and GoatCounter's hosted service is free for reasonable use; try them before building.
- 1. Install one agent: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor.
- 2. Make an empty folder and open it in the agent.
- 3. Paste the prompt below, press enter, and answer its questions as it builds.
The prompt
Build me a small privacy-friendly web analytics server to replace Fathom Analytics. Requirements: - Node.js 22 + TypeScript: a Hono server on @hono/node-server with server-rendered JSX pages and uPlot charts. `npm start` serves the dashboard and the collector on http://localhost:4710. - Storage: better-sqlite3 in ./data/fathom.db: a hits table (site, ts, pathname, referrer host, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, country, browser, os, device, visitor_hash, is_unique) and an events table (site, ts, name, value_cents). Hourly rollup tables feed the charts. - Script: GET /script.js returns under 2 KB of JavaScript that sends the pathname, referrer and UTM parameters to POST /collect on load and on history.pushState. No cookies or storage. window.fathom.trackEvent(name, valueCents) records a goal. Honour Do Not Track. - Visitors: hash a daily random salt + site + IP + user agent; a hit is unique the first time that hash is seen that day. Keep salts for 24 hours only and never store IPs. Country from a DB-IP Lite .mmdb file (path in .env) with `maxmind`; browser and OS from `ua-parser-js`. - Bots: drop requests that `isbot` flags, that lack a user agent, or whose IP falls in the CIDR ranges of a file you refresh weekly from AWS's ip-ranges.json. Show a count of blocked hits on the dashboard. - Dashboard: one page per site with a date range, a visitors and pageviews chart, and tables for pages, referrers, countries, browsers, UTM campaigns and events with total value. Clicking a row filters the rest. - Sharing: an optional public link per site, with an optional password from .env. - Export: a CSV download of any table for a date range. - Single owner: one password in .env, signed cookie. SITES in .env lists accepted domains. No accounts, no telemetry, local-first. - Out of scope: email reports, a Google Analytics importer, an API, multiple users, funnels. - README: the script tag to paste, running behind Caddy for HTTPS, and a warning that the collector must be reachable from visitors' browsers, so a laptop behind a home router will not do.
Opens your agent with the prompt filled in, you press enter. Or copy it and paste it into an empty folder.
Then keep going
Next prompts, same folder.
The first prompt builds the core. Run these one at a time in the same folder to grow it into your own Fathom Analytics.
Add email reports to the analytics server in this folder. Requirements: - A weekly report per site, sent Monday 08:00 in the owner's timezone through nodemailer with SMTP settings in .env. - Content: visitors and pageviews against the previous week (percent change), the top 5 pages, top 5 referrers and goals completed, as plain HTML with no images. - A "send now" button in the dashboard and a log of sent reports in SQLite. - Update the README.
Add first-party serving to the analytics server in this folder. Requirements: - Make the script path and the collect path configurable in .env (SCRIPT_PATH, COLLECT_PATH) so a reverse proxy can mount them on the site's own domain, e.g. /stats/a.js. - Update the script to read the collect path from its own tag instead of a constant. - Add a Caddyfile snippet and an nginx location block to the README. - Test that the collector still accepts hits behind a path prefix.
Add a historical import to the analytics server in this folder. Requirements: - A CLI command `npm run import -- <site> <file.csv>` for a daily CSV with date, pageviews and visitors columns. - Store imported days in their own table; charts add them to live data and mark them dashed. - Refuse a file that overlaps days already collected live, and print the first overlapping date. - Update the README with how to produce the CSV.
What you lose
- Hosting that scales through traffic spikes and keeps the dashboard up
- Bot and datacenter filtering maintained by Fathom
- Custom domains for the script so ad blockers leave it alone, and EU isolation of visitor data
- Email reports, the Google Analytics importer and shared dashboards with passwords
- Revenue and campaign reports with a maintained API
Why people still pay
People pay for a dashboard they actually open, no consent banner to design, and no server to patch. Fathom is cloud-only and closed source, so the choice is between paying and running something like Umami yourself.
Fathom Analytics or your own copy?
Over
Your usage
3h ×$/h
Fathom Analytics, 1 yr$180
Your own copy, 1 yr$44running + build session
You keep$137pays for itself in the first month
Estimate · Free on a server you already run, about $5 a month for a small VPS otherwise. The build itself is token usage on your agent plan.
Take your data, then cancel.
1 · Take your data out of Fathom Analytics
- 1Open the dashboard, click the download icon in the top right, and choose Download Dashboard: a ZIP of CSVs arrives with pages, referrers, sources, browsers, countries, events and UTM files for the filters you applied.
- 2For the full history, choose Custom Export (or Settings, your site, More, Exports) and pick Pageviews or Events, a date range such as All Time, a grouping from hourly to yearly, and the dimensions you want.
- 3Large exports are queued and Fathom emails you when the CSV is ready; use Preview Export first to see the row estimate.
- 4Imported Google Analytics history can be exported too, if your site has it.
2 · Cancel Fathom Analytics
- 1Go to Settings, then Billing, and click Cancel in the Subscription section.
- 2The subscription ends at the end of the current billing period and you aren't charged again; click 'I changed my mind' on the same page to undo it before then.
- 3Fathom then queues your sites and analytics data for deletion, which can take up to 60 days; resubscribing within that time restores them.
- 4Deleting the account under Settings, then Account is a separate, immediate and permanent action.
- Export before cancelling: the help pages say a lapsed account's data is removed within 60 days.
- The refund policy isn't on the cancel page; ask support if you cancel soon after a charge.
- Run your own collector next to Fathom for a month first and compare the visitor counts, since the two will count unique visitors a little differently.
- Remove the Fathom script tag from your site once the new one is live, or both will keep sending hits.
Checked 2026-10-19 against Fathom Analytics's docs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The escape hatch
Don't feel like building it? These are already free.
UmamiOpen sourceMIT-licensed, cookie-free analytics with events, campaigns and revenue views; Node and Postgres, or its own cloud.★ 39k · active Oct 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗Plausible Community EditionOpen sourceThe AGPL version of Plausible on your own Postgres and ClickHouse; some cloud features such as funnels are left out.★ 30k · active Oct 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗GoatCounterOpen sourceEUPL-licensed, very light counter: one binary, SQLite or Postgres, no tracking of personal data; also offered as a donation-supported hosted service, free for reasonable use.★ 6.1k · active Sep 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗
WebVisit ↗Plausible Community EditionOpen sourceThe AGPL version of Plausible on your own Postgres and ClickHouse; some cloud features such as funnels are left out.★ 30k · active Oct 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗GoatCounterOpen sourceEUPL-licensed, very light counter: one binary, SQLite or Postgres, no tracking of personal data; also offered as a donation-supported hosted service, free for reasonable use.★ 6.1k · active Sep 2026 · docker to self-host
WebVisit ↗
The numbers
Fathom Analytics pricing
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100K pageviews | $15 | $12.50 | Up to 100,000 pageviews a month and 50 sites; events, UTM and revenue tracking, API, shared dashboards, unlimited email reports and CSV exports. |
| 200K pageviews | $25 | $20.83 | Up to 200,000 pageviews a month, same features. |
| 500K pageviews | $45 | $37.50 | Up to 500,000 pageviews a month, same features. |
| 1M pageviews | $60 | $50 | Up to 1,000,000 pageviews a month, same features. |
| 2M pageviews | $100 | $83.33 | Up to 2,000,000 pageviews a month, same features. |
| Over 25M pageviews | custom | — | Custom allowance on a separate high-traffic page. |
- Free tier
- No free hosted plan.
- Billing
- Monthly, or yearly with two months free; the yearly figures in the tiers are our arithmetic from that offer. Billed in USD and renewed automatically. 7-day trial with a card required; Fathom emails you before the first charge. Cancel in account settings with no contract.
- Hidden costs
- Custom events count toward the same pageview allowance as pageviews, and the allowance is shared across all sites. Extra packs of 50 sites cost $10 a month. A site that stays over its tier for two billing periods triggers an upgrade request, and an unresolved overage can lock dashboard and API access while data keeps being collected.
- Source
- usefathom.com
Also on the list
Related apps
No free plan, only a 7-day trial with a card on file. The old self-hosted Fathom Lite is free but no longer gets features.
Yes. An AI coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can build a usable personal version in one session with the prompt on this page, running on your own machine.
About $15 a month on the 100,000 pageviews a month plan, $180 a year (checked 2026-10-19).
Hosting that scales through traffic spikes and keeps the dashboard up; Bot and datacenter filtering maintained by Fathom; Custom domains for the script so ad blockers leave it alone, and EU isolation of visitor data; Email reports, the Google Analytics importer and shared dashboards with passwords; Revenue and campaign reports with a maintained API. If any of those matter to you, keep paying.
Yes: Umami (open source), Plausible Community Edition (open source), GoatCounter (open source).