Here's the context:

I just finished building my website to sell my software. Then I realized I had a big problem: I have no idea what's happening on my site, where people are visiting from, how they interact, etc.

I've used Shopify a lot, and I'm addicted to the Shopify live view. I check it almost every hour when I open my phone.

I looked for something simple to add to my site. I don't need anything complex, Google Analytics 4 feels way too complicated for me, and PostHog's dashboard is the same. Just too much.

Then I found Plausible. Their dashboard makes perfect sense to me, simple and easy to understand.

Honestly, I could just use Shopify + Plausible and be done with it. But paying a monthly subscription for a small app like this makes me hesitate. I have tons of little apps like this that don't generate revenue, lol. So I wanted something I could plug directly into my Rails admin panel to check stats easily.

I did some research in the Rails world to see what's available. There's Ahoy, but it's only the backend part. I also found Ahoy Captain for the UI, but it seems abandoned.

So I decided to take a shot at building my own analytics engine. That way, for future projects, I can just plug it in and be done.

Here is a live demo, you can check: https://bulkcrop.ai/admin/analytics and live view here: https://bulkcrop.ai/admin/analytics/live

You can check the gem here: https://github.com/darkamenosa/ahoy_analytics