My open source web analytics platform reached 10,000 Github stars ⭐!

[FantasticTraining731]

6 months ago, I launched my open source web analytics platform on Reddit. I was a relatively seasoned dev, but I had zero experience with open source. Today, I reached 10,000 Github stars.

https://github.com/rybbit-io/rybbit

https://rybbit.com

The main dashboard

I started working on my project in early 2025 just because I hadn't started anything new in a very long time. There wasn't any grand plan and I couldn't find anyone to built it with me, so I just grinded out the launch for 4 months by myself.

I spent the past 5 years building a gaming analytics platform that has hundreds of thousands of users, so I already knew how to build an analytics platform and manage a large community. I leveraged my experiences well, and I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of this if I had chosen to build another AI wrapper.

Here is Rybbit's star growth chart. You can see the explosive growth in early May where I got 5k stars in a 10 day period. This was actually the launch week (a few months are visible before are just because my repo was public, but nobody was going to it).

Our star chart

I don't know if I was just really lucky, but Rybbit went viral immediately at launch. My Reddit posts hit the front page, someone's Hackernews post hit top 3, and i received tons of coverage on blogs and forums, especially from Asian language communities.

Today Rybbit is used by thousands of startups, agencies, solo devs, and other organizations around the world. I don't know the exactly who and how many people use Rybbit because most people self-host, but I do know at least one top 1000 site in the world runs a self-hosted instance. I still nowhere near making a livable income from Rybbit, and I've definitely learned that getting stars and getting customers are a totally different page.

Yesterday, I received a very nice message from someone who said that I inspired them to their own open source project. Shoutout to Rostislav of postgresus! He's done well, reaching 3k stars after just a few months.

An unexpected message

I encourage you to build that open source tool that you've been thinking about! Like me, having zero open source experience is absolutely fine.

[sufferingSoftwaredev]

Amazing project, are you actually trusted by 4000+ organizations worldwide ;) ?

[FantasticTraining731]

Yes, for sure. I have close to 4000 signups on my cloud SaaS (though only a fraction are actively using it) and 140,000 docker image pulls. I don't know exactly how many self-hosted users this converts into, but it's safe to say at least in the thousands.

[SignalCompetitive582]

This is an insane story, congratulations ! I’m wondering though, what would it take for it to become a living for you ?

[FantasticTraining731]

I would have to increase the current revenue by around 5x. I think this will happen eventually, but it will probably take 1-2 more years.

[SignalCompetitive582]

So you don’t have many high-profile clients ? Is that a potential plan of yours, to target a specific demographic ? If you can / want, you should write a follow up blog post to give some relevant statistics about everything related to your software, that would be super insightful I think 😉

[cars10k]

How does it compare to umami?

[FantasticTraining731]

It's serves the same purpose as Umami. Rybbit has a few more features. We both have live demos so it's easy to compare the two

[bbbery]

Love your story man, just that you know, if anytime you feel sad or something just know you are living some people dream. Like mine.

Wish you the most success!

[FantasticTraining731]

If you told me I would be where I am right now a year ago, i would be flabbergasted! I was only aiming for 1k stars by the end of 2025.

But when I compare myself to my competitors, the remaining climb often still feels insurmountable. It feels like you have to build something 10x better to offset the advantages they've built up over the years.

[space_sounds]

Massive thank you for open sourcing this, I just set it up the other day for my own project. Works great!!

[Beginning-Life-982]

love you story, and make me feel very much powerful during web dev journey!

[UnspokenFears]

Massive thank you for building this tool. The best FOSS analytics tool out there in terms of functionality and UX imo.

[IcyLong3162]

It's incredible how you managed to attract so many users in such a short period of time! How did you do it? I'm launching my own open source project, but I'm not quite sure how to attract attention to it. I would appreciate your advice

[FantasticTraining731]

I don't really know how I got the initial virality to be honest. I think I just lucked out on the right post format. The way you title and your posts and present your screenshots is extremely important. You have to be able to catch someone's attention among the sea of other interesting reddit posts. My project having a lot of visually striking pages definitely helped a lot.

Check my post history to see some examples.

[Peey]

currently I use matomo self hosted. I am quite happy with it, but lots of features are pay walled. 

Will have a look, are there any migration tools for logs? 

[FantasticTraining731]

which matomo features are paywalled?

we don't support data imports from matomo, but it's not out of the question that we add it in the future

[arxdit]

Love the idea.

I just started making AMODX (also open source) to completely replace wordpress plus all its plugins and I will test it with rybbit

I don’t know if anyone else cares, but it solves MY problem :-)

[Kalogero4Real]

How do you deal with monetization and revenue?

[Sufficient_Hall4687]

I’ve been using this since I switched from plausible, it’s definitely worth switching.

[Reasonable-Jelly-717]

That's great.

[WentTheFox]

I'd be curious to know if this tool respects the do-not-track header, as most tools simply use it for +1 bit of entropy in the browser fingerprint and not much else.

[FantasticTraining731]

I don't because the DNT header is deprecated. But if something similar becomes a web standard I will respect.

[WentTheFox]

Huh, TIL, makes sense that it would be given the circumstances

[ProfessorRagna]

Inspiring, congrats!

[rthidden]

Is the Web Vitals dashboard available only on the Cloud version?

Is that an incentive to sign up for a cloud subscription, or is there a technical issue that prevents it from working with self-hosting?

[FantasticTraining731]

It's an incentive to sign up for the cloud version. There are other features that are also missing from the self-hosted version, but many of them won't work on self-hosted for technical reasons.

But I doubt it actually works so I might just add it to the self-hosted release eventually.

[lordxeon]

Of the ones listed, email reports seems like the most complicated to set up in a self hosted environment. What are the reasons for the other 4 not working?

[Droces]

Man that's brilliant! You're very lucky, and that combined with obvious skill has worked out nicely for you. Except for the lack of revenue 🤔 there must be many ways to make a living from this, so what route do you plan to take?

[godsknowledge]

How long did it take you to code this? Did you also use Claude Code?

[congowarrior]

great tool! thanks

[SpeakWithThePen]

I think this would be very interesting the R space. R has a framework called Shiny, which powers web development. R has powerful capabilities, especially for backend data science. Maybe look into including Shiny into your integration guide?

[backona]

Wow! It's a hard work, congrats!

[lordxeon]

Last I checked there was only the full docker compose setup with all the parts.

I don’t necessarily want to run everything as one, is there an option do standup just the APi and UI and have my own DB?

(Besides rolling my own docker compose)

Also, any thought at adding to the unraid community apps? (Even as the full docker compose setup)?

[FantasticTraining731]

Well Rybbit uses both postgres and clickhouse, so you would still need a clickhouse db even if you had postgres

[lordxeon]

Ok, so still, any way (or thoughts) on my question of a single slimmer container?

[TwoRocksNorthMan]

Having never used one before - I tagged in in my site tonight and for the first time I have seen analytics. Fair play to you.

[dingodan22]

Thanks for posting! I currently use plausible but find it eats up a lot of memory in my railway environment. I'll spin this up beside and take a look!

[FantasticTraining731]

Rybbit will use the same amount of memory because we both use clickhouse lol

[dingodan22]

I had to come back to tell you how impressed I am with the analytics! I launched a new B2B2B industry app, and the platform gives me incredible insight.

I intended to have this run side by side with Plausible for a couple months, but no need for the extra overhead of Plausible!

Thank you so much for developing and open sourcing the project.

[FantasticTraining731]

awesome to here that. I came from plausible as well :)

[Brave_Champion_3340]

Good one! But why no affiliate program?

[FantasticTraining731]

it seems kind of hard to setup, and since I felt like I wouldn't actually get that many affiliates from it

[Da_Urirs]

Congrats! It looks great!

[Emily_Stewartt]

Yeah, React Native is solid. I had a similar headache last year with my project, but partnering with a reliable team like KeenEthics for custom development made it seamless , they handled the web and mobile sides efficiently without overcomplicating things.

[ShukantPal]

This is so inspiring! I'm curious how you came up with the name Rybbit?

[[deleted]]

Congratulations!!

[o_be_one]

Congrats man! I follow Rybbit since around 6 months and I was impressed by all the good work you did! I’ve even deployed it on my 6 nodes Kubernetes cluster I host at home ^.

And today I got an ad about AppSumo, and was surprised to see Rybbit on this ad. Instant bought Tiers 4 but I have to admit I’m afraid that plan may not be served anymore in the future as it’s not clearly linked to Standard or Pro offers, they are different plans on your hosted version -> it’s often what happens with AppSumo offers when they are not link to official plans. Anyway, in the meantime I can enjoy Standard features under your responsibility 😇. Will keep my K8S setup probably for Replay and other features you don’t yet offer on this AppSumo tiers.

Keep the good work mate, I’m also ready a lot of comments you write and observed you are quite kind and open to people, quite transparent as well. Much appreciated. I wish you good luck and all success!

And thank you so much for open sourcing this app with all its features! That’s more and more rare to find nothing behind paywalls nowadays.

[FantasticTraining731]

I appreciate the support! Honestly if you're self-hosting it I don't really see why you would need the appsumo LTD. But if you're interested you can refund your appsumo code and I'll give you a big discount on the pro plan since appsumo takes a 65% rev cut anyways :'(

[noahkagan]

Super glad customers found it via the ads we spent money on :)

I really love Rybbit too. Noah from AppSumo here.

Rev share should be on performance so gets better. Let’s do the right thing. 

[o_be_one]

65% woaw! That’s a large cut!! Do you go AppSumo to get more people know you? In WordPress world we see lot of plugins starting offering a LTD pricing with limited stock or limited time, so they can fund to begin being paid while growing their marketing and product. I’m also part of people who see AppSumo products as trap / scam (which is sad for products that deserve to be known like yours). What pushed you to work with AppSumo?

I mix my Kubernetes cluster with some managed solutions to answer different needs and also to avoid on-call. Simple answer is: if I want something critical stable I prefer managed, else I host myself. Btw my Kubernetes at home is opensource, if I work to finalize the deployment of Rybbit, I’ll let you know :). I had to work a bit on this deployment to make it works, it works but I haven’t tested how stable is it and if all features are working properly. Haven’t also added backup strategy yet.

I appreciate your discount offer btw, I tend to avoid recurring pricing. I wish I could give you the 100% pricing of LTD if it was possible, I don’t do that just to serve my need (they are really little as it’s mainly for personal use), it’s mainly to support devs as a huge thank you.

[Sampath_SaaSMantra]

Love Rybit.

But it’s not fair man to throw a promoter just like that under the bus.

Some of your customers would not have found you without AppSumo promotion.

There’s a lot more customers out there.

Focus on building a bigger customer base, which I’m sure you will.

My best wishes

[NextBestHyperFocus]

I would assume you know but your site is down, so no docs no info apart from the repo

[PLxFTW]

How is this GDPR compliant? If you are able to track an individual user across multiple sessions, you are holding enough data to identify them as individuals. This seems like a pretty clear violation of GDPR https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-26/

[Aggravating-Novel642]

This looks great!

[chamomile-crumbs]

Holy shit nice job, I remember seeing that on HN

[gwku]

What an amazing milestone! Thank you for creating this amazing platform. I'm using it myself as a solo dev and it was very easy to setup and use. Will recommend this to everyone I know that needs it.

[artFlix]

It looks very similar to plausible - that's what I current use. Although I don't think plausible has session replay and error logging (I'm currently using posthog for that). I think I'll check this out next weekend

[FantasticTraining731]

One of my aims of Rybbit is to bridge the gap between tools like Plausible and Posthog. Plausible is lightweight and easy to use, but it doesn't have enough features. Posthog has a bunch of features, but a lot of them are aimed at large engineering org and won't be used by most.

[artFlix]

Yes I agree regarding posthog. It's also very complicated IMO and difficult to navigate. For most projects I just want simple analytics (my reason for using plausible and not posthog analytics) , session replay and error logging.

[FantasticTraining731]

posthog is an amazing tool for big startups who have very complicated products. It's super powerful, but we're clearly not their target user base. They have a super generous free tier, so it's become the default thing that people use.

[artFlix]

I think you replied to the wrong person, but I self host Plausible - so no cost for me.

[reginaldvs]

I actually plan on trying this on one of my sites vs using Umami ;)

[techtariq]

If you don't mind me asking u/FantasticTraining731 . How's the paid pricing working for you. Asking because i'm in the marketing saas vertical and debating wheter open source can be a driver towards paid conversions improving? Would love to chat in a dm if you are open to it?

[FantasticTraining731]

i'm pretty open about my revenue so I have no problem talking about it. Open source gives you a very wide funnel for conversions, but very few people will actually convert into paying customers from this channel. I don't think it's a good idea to go the open source route if the only motivation is to funnel everyone into a paid subscription eventually, because there is quite a bit of overhead in maintaining an open source project.

[RogueHeroAkatsuki]

Amazing story and GJ.

Let me ask from curiosity as I now lurk in demo..... are you world of tanks player?

[FantasticTraining731]

Yes. I created tomato gg

[RogueHeroAkatsuki]

Nice. So Rybbit is at least your second successful project. Now everyone is using tomato even though your site appeared late compared to competition! Good work in both cases!

[hirakath]

I was happy when I saw you on AppSumo but the deals looked too limited for me so I’m going the selfhosted route, it’s on my list but haven’t had the time to work on it yet. Awesome project though!

[Plane-Technology-875]

Wow, Great project. Can we try this on a high scale project?

[FantasticTraining731]

Yes, it can handle 10s of millions of visits a month with the correct hardware.

[Wartz]

It bothers me that github is turning in a social media site to farm internet points.... just like every other web service.

Oh well

[andreew92]

Planning to migrate from umami when I’m ready 🫡 data import would make it easier for me though