Analytics for indie hackers: know which post paid the rent

Indie hackers ship many small bets and need to know quickly which ones deserve another week. That's a different job from enterprise analytics: no analyst, no tag plan, no budget for a tool that costs more than the product earns.

VisitTrack fits that loop. Every plan includes unlimited sites, so the price follows your combined traffic, not the number of experiments. A Stripe, Lemon Squeezy or Polar webhook turns the dashboard into a scoreboard of which channel earned what, and public dashboards plus embeddable widgets cover the build-in-public side.

The metrics that matter for a one-person product

1. 1.Revenue by referrer

   The only ranking that matters when your time is the scarce resource. A Reddit thread that sends 300 visitors and $240 beats an X post that sends 3,000 visitors and nothing.

2. 2.Signups per project per week

   A simple trend line per site tells you which experiment is alive. Pair it with the all-sites gallery to compare projects at a glance.

3. 3.Launch-day spike and decay

   How much traffic a launch sent on day one, and how much was still coming on day seven. Launches that keep sending traffic usually mean the listing ranks or got shared onward.

4. 4.Search queries that already bring visitors

   Google Search Console keywords next to your pages show the free distribution you didn't plan — often the best clue for the next blog post.

5. 5.Outbound clicks to your other products

   If you cross-promote, outbound link tracking shows which projects feed each other.

Questions indie hackers actually ask

Which of my projects should I keep working on?

Compare signups and revenue per site over 30–90 days in the all-sites view. Traffic without signups is a hobby; signups without revenue is a pricing problem.

Was the Product Hunt or Hacker News launch worth it?

Filter by the referrer and look at signups and payments, then check again a month later — the product launches guide covers this in detail.

Which tweet or post made the sale?

Tag links with UTM parameters; the Revenue tab shows the campaign on each payment. Untagged clicks from X still show up as the t.co referrer, grouped under social.

Can I show my traffic publicly?

Turn on the public dashboard for a read-only link, or embed a widget — a live badge, a trend card, a world map — on your site or /open page.

How to set up VisitTrack as an indie hacker

Two minutes for traffic, ten more for revenue.

1. 1

   Add one site per project

   Create a site for each domain and paste its tag into the project's layout. On a static or no-code site, use the platform's custom-code field — guides for Framer, Webflow and Astro.

   <script defer data-site="SITE_ID" src="https://visitrack.app/tracker.js"></script>

2. 2

   Exclude yourself

   Open your site once with ?vt_ignore=1 on the URL and that browser stops counting — so your own refreshes on launch day don't inflate the numbers.

3. 3

   Connect your checkout

   Indie products often sell through Lemon Squeezy or Polar: pass the visitor id as custom.visitrack_visitor_id (Lemon Squeezy) or metadata.visitrack_visitor_id (Polar) and connect the webhook in Settings → Revenue. See Lemon Squeezy and Polar.

4. 4

   Mark the signup or the waitlist join

   For a waitlist form, data-vt-goal="waitlist" on the button records the click with no JavaScript. For real accounts, call visitrack("signup") after the account is created.

   <button type="submit" data-vt-goal="waitlist">Join the waitlist</button>

5. 5

   Ask your AI assistant instead of opening dashboards

   Connect the MCP server to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor and ask "which project grew this week and from where?" — or run npx visitrack stats in a terminal. See API, CLI and MCP.

Example: a three-project portfolio after one month

A solo founder with a paid SaaS tool, a free directory and a newsletter landing page, all on one account.

Illustrative numbers for a typical site of this kind, not real customer data.

The founder's instinct was that the HN launch was the win. The dashboard says the steady Reddit threads earned four times more per visitor, and the directory's Google traffic is worth monetizing with a paid listing tier rather than ignoring.

VisitTrack vs the usual indie stack

Indie hackers usually choose between free (GA4, Cloudflare Web Analytics), cheap and simple (Plausible, Umami), and revenue-focused tools. Third-party details as of October 2026.

Cloudflare Web Analytics is a fine free counter if you only need pageviews and already proxy through Cloudflare. Umami is a good choice if you want to self-host. Once money comes in, the missing piece is attribution — see VisitTrack vs Umami and vs Cloudflare Web Analytics.

What VisitTrack costs for an indie portfolio

Events are counted across all your sites, so a portfolio of small projects shares one plan.

Every feature is on every plan; the price only follows monthly events (pageviews, custom events and payments, counted across all your sites). Bot and AI-crawler hits and session replays are never billed. Yearly billing is ten months' price for twelve, every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with no card, and there's a one-time lifetime deal from $59.