Self-hosted · cookie-less · k-anonymized · your hardware
Observer is behavior analytics without the trade-off: Hotjar-depth sessions, heatmaps and frustration detection plus the GA4 reporting core — on your own server, with zero cookies and zero browser storage. Identity is a daily-rotated hash that is mathematically impossible to join across days. There is nothing to consent to — so there is no banner.
v0.1.0 · 53/53 capabilities shipped · 95 automated tests passing · zero npm packages in the serving path
Live proof — on this page, right now
These three numbers are read from your browser as you read this. Observer's marketing site ships no tracker, sets no cookie and talks to no third party — the same posture the product enforces by default.
document.cookie is empty.
The Observer platform
Every competitor asks you to give something up. Observer's architecture is designed so that identity cannot persist — and every feature is built on top of that constraint, not despite it.
Daily-rotated HMAC identity derived server-side, per-site namespaces, k‑anonymity n ≥ 5 on every row, append-only audit log. Long-term tracking is impossible by construction — that is why the default mode needs no consent.
Read the privacy architectureSession timelines with tab-split lanes, click/scroll heatmaps, rage and dead-click detection, frustration leaderboard, form drop-off, sandboxed replay. The Hotjar layer — derived from server-side identity, not device-stored IDs.
Explore the behavior layerViews, sources, countries, devices, goals, funnels, engaged time, Core Web Vitals at p50–p95, anomaly cards and deploy diffs — the GA4 core, without the identity model, on data you own.
See the reporting coreSignature capability
When a visitor opens a second tab mid-session, a new lane branches off at that exact moment. Page views, clicks with element and page position, scrolls, errors, goals and Web Vitals stay on one shared time axis — concurrent browsing shown side by side, never flattened. No other analytics tool models concurrent tabs.
And because a session is an anonymized device-day — derived server-side, never tied to a persistent ID — this whole depth ships with zero consent burden.
Heatmaps & frustration
Click heatmaps on a 1%-grid, scroll depth by band, rage clicks (≥3 clicks in 500 ms within 48 px) and dead clicks on non-interactive elements — rendered over the live page or a stored snapshot, with 375/768/1280 device presets and per-element ranking from stable data-obs-id attributes.
The frustration leaderboard ranks every page by (rage×3 + dead×1.5 + errors×2) ÷ views with root-cause counts, and form analytics exposes per-field drop-off with a "leak" badge past 25% — field values are never read, labels are hashed, only counts leave the browser.
Ask Observer
A natural-language bar in the topbar parses 13 intents plus natural date ranges through a unit-tested grammar — deterministic parsing, live dashboards, zero hallucination.
The refusals are features
These are not roadmap items. They are architectural refusals — enforced by a static audit that fails the build on any violation. They are exactly why the banner-free posture is defensible.
No canvas, WebGL, audio or font probes. Ever. The static privacy audit fails the build if any probe appears in the SDK.
Every site gets its own identity namespace. Your blog cannot correlate with your shop — enforced by construction, not policy.
Visitor data never flows to ad networks. Observer is analytics, not surveillance — there is no audience to sell.
The recorder masks all inputs at source — values never leave the browser. Form analytics counts fields, never reads content.
The IP lives for milliseconds — geo lookup and HMAC input — then it is gone. Never logged, never serialized, CI-checked.
Pricing
No per-traffic, per-site, per-seat or per-feature charges. The only cost is the infrastructure you already own — at 60 million events a month, that is roughly a €60–90 VPS.
| Platform | ~60M events / month | Heatmaps + behavior | Consent banner | Data on your servers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observer (self-host) | ~€60–90 infra | Yes — incl. tab-split lanes | Not needed | Yes |
| PostHog cloud | ≈ $2,950 / mo | Yes | Required | No |
| Matomo On-Premise Business | €1,450 / mo | Premium plugin | Configurable | Partial |
| Vercel Web Analytics Pro | ≈ $1,820 / mo | No | Not needed | No |
| Umami Cloud Business | ≈ $1,200 / mo | Business tier | Not needed | No |
| Microsoft Clarity | $0 — no self-host, no API | Replay only | EEA consent | No |
Competitor figures verified from vendor pricing pages during the 2026 competitive research waves (docs/COMPARISON.md carries the fetch trail).
capabilities shipped — coverage index 100%
capabilities unique in the entire field of 15 competitors
automated tests + a 6-spec browser privacy suite
npm packages in the serving path — collector, API, SDK, dashboard, MCP
ClickHouse, collector and API in Docker, one line of HTML on your site — and the deepest legal analytics you can run starts filling with honest data.
Illustrations by GetIllustrations.com (Loomies pack).