Just a little analytics insight for your personal or indie project

A counter pixel? What does it count?

A 1×1 pixel transparent GIF is very 1997, yes, but it’s also very efficient and easy to use in websites with just an <img> tag.

If you add piratepx to a website, it counts page views out of the box. With a little JavaScript, it can be extended to count events you’re interested in like a <button> click or <form> submission.

For mobile apps, server-side APIs, CLIs, and anywhere else, you can count events like the number of times the app is opened, a user signs up, or an operation is run – anywhere a little insight would help.

What’s the catch?

piratepx is designed to be simple and constrained in a way that makes it feasible to run at a very low cost.

• Only the last 30 days of counts are stored
• Counts are aggregated on a per day basis
• There’s no concept of unique users or sessions

So, you can say the catch is that it’s limited... on purpose.

It’s free, so am I the product?

While this is true most of the time, it’s not the case here. piratepx has no nefarious plan to harvest browsing data, sell ads, or anything like that.

It’s just a tool, built by one developer, to help other developers of small-scale projects avoid choosing Google Analytics simply because it’s the free option.