Analytics for Indie Hackers: Free, Fast, Honest
The solo-founder analytics stack: one free tracker, UTMs on everything, revenue webhooks, and ten minutes of review per week.
Indie hacking runs on small numbers honestly read: thirty visitors from a launch post, four signups, one customer. At that scale every analytics mistake is fatal to the signal — a consent banner that deletes a third of thirty visitors, your own refreshes counted as traffic, a $50/month tool eating margin before revenue exists. The indie stack is therefore strict: free, complete, and ruthless about what gets measured.
The whole stack
- One cookieless tracker (free 10k events/month forever covers pre-revenue scale comfortably) — complete data, no banner, 1.1 KB.
- UTMs on every link you post: launch posts, directories, your bio links — the conventions take ten minutes to adopt and answer 'which community actually converts' forever.
- Four events: signup, activation, payment (via Stripe webhook), and one CTA click. Done.
- Exclude yourself — at solo scale you are a measurable traffic source (the localStorage flag).
Reading small numbers without lying to yourself
- Directions, not decimals: 4 signups vs 2 is not '100% growth'; it is two more humans. Watch weekly trends over months, ignore daily noise.
- Sources over totals: 100 visitors from HN that vanish lose to 15 from a niche forum that convert — at indie scale, channel quality is everything and volume is vanity.
- Read every journey: the indie superpower nobody uses — at thirty visitors a day you can literally look at each timeline. The visitor who hit your pricing page three times this week is a launch email waiting to be written.
Ten minutes a week, then back to building
Sunday: signups by source, activation of the week's cohort, any errors on the money path. Decide one thing. Close the tab. Analytics for an indie product is a compass check, not a hobby — the startup version of this discipline scales up when you do.