melytics

Web analytics for the rest of us.
Cookieless by default. Self-hosted on shared hosting. MCP server built in.

Install guide ↓

Runs on the shared hosting you already have. Talks to your AI.

• No VPS, no Docker, no ClickHouse. Every other self-hosted analytics assumes a server you administer. melytics runs on plain cPanel-style shared hosting: PHP + SQLite + a cron line. If your host can run WordPress, it can run melytics — see deploy/shared-hosting.md.
• Every install is an MCP server. Paste a connector URL from the dashboard into Claude and ask "what were my top pages last week?", "did the launch spike hold?" — answered from your own data, no dashboard tab needed. See mcp/README.md.

Features

Core analytics

• Visitors, pageviews, views/visit, visit duration, bounce rate — stat strip with sparklines that double as chart metric toggles
• Sessions (30-min gap), entry & exit pages
• Breakdowns: pages, referrers, countries, devices, browsers, OS, UTM sources / mediums / campaigns, and channels (Direct / Search / Social / AI / Email / Referral)
• Cross-filter — click any breakdown row and every stat and panel re-filters to that segment
• Live view — who's on the site right now, one row per visitor, powered by a tracker heartbeat
• Date ranges: presets stay live (rolling), custom ranges with this-month / last-month / YTD / last-12-months shortcuts

Goals, funnels & events

• Goals on custom events or page paths, with conversion rates and inline edit
• Multi-step funnels with per-step drop-off and layout variants
• Custom events: melytics.track('signup', {plan: 'pro'})
• Event properties — explore any event's properties: value distributions for strings, sum/avg/count for numbers, and numeric-by-category grouping (purchase value by product = revenue by product)
• Goal revenue — point an event goal at a numeric property and it sums as revenue (with average per conversion), shown in your site's currency
• Autotracking: outbound links, file downloads, 404s — zero config
• Setup assistant — a guided wizard that creates goals and funnels from your real tracked pages, no code needed for path-based goals

Cross-filter in action — one click on the Countries panel:

Performance & alerts

• Web Vitals p75 (LCP / INP / CLS / TTFB) with good/needs-work/poor thresholds, straight from real visitors
• Spike & drop alerts — hourly check against the trailing week's median, designed alert email with a mini chart, per-site toggle
• Chart annotations — mark launches and releases right on the graph
• Bots module — blocked crawler and scraper traffic, counted and named in its own panel instead of polluting your stats

Audience (tier-2, consent-gated)

• Retention (new vs returning), weekly cohorts, loyalty buckets
• First-touch attribution and time-to-convert for converting visitors

Layouts — make it yours

Every visual module has layout variants, one click away and remembered per browser: the chart and its sparklines share five mark styles (Smooth / Linear / Step / Bars / Glow), funnels render five ways (Rows / Strip / Taper / Statline / Bars), and Web Vitals five more (Tiles / Tracks / Gauges / Bullet / Scoreline). Every variant below also exists in the other theme — see docs/screenshots/.

Dashboard

• Light / dark / system theme
• Drag-to-reorder modules, density toggle, per-module visibility — hidden modules aren't even fetched
• Public share links (password-optional, stateless HMAC tokens)
• Weekly email digest
• Email delivery built in — a guided SMTP form (admin-only) connects any email provider for digests, alerts, and password resets; sendmail by default
• Account panel: theme, notifications, multi-site management with copy-paste snippet

Integrations

• MCP server built in — connect Claude via a URL from the dashboard, or any MCP client (9 tools, mcp/README.md)
• Plain JSON API behind the dashboard

Layout

Dir	What
api/	Laravel API — ingest, enrichment, rollups, stats endpoints
dashboard/	Vue 3 + Tailwind SPA — mounts anywhere (relative base + hash router)
tracker/	The snippet. <1KB gzipped, zero deps
mcp/	AI assistant setup guide + optional local stdio MCP server (the HTTP MCP endpoint lives in the app itself)
deploy/	Shared-hosting guide (any cPanel-style host), first-party proxy template, docker-compose for VPS
docs/	Session handoff log, screenshots

Install without a terminal (shared hosting)

Grab the release zip (or build one with bash deploy/build-release.sh), then:

1. Give melytics its own address. In your hosting panel, create a subdomain — stats.your-domain.com works nicely — and note which folder it serves (usually public_html/stats). Everything melytics lives in that one folder.

2. Get the zip's files into that folder. The files sit at the top of the zip (no folder inside a folder), so:

   • If your file manager can extract into the current folder: upload the zip into the subdomain's folder and extract it there.
   • If it always asks for a new folder name (Hostinger and most panel file managers do): upload the zip one level up (public_html/), remove the subdomain's folder if the panel already made one, and extract using the subdomain folder's exact name (stats). The extraction creates the folder for you.

   Delete the zip afterwards. Ended up with everything one folder too deep? Move that folder's contents up one level and delete the empty folder.

   Prefer to skip the zip entirely? Upload the one-file melytics-installer.php into the subdomain's folder and open it in your browser — it downloads and unpacks the release by itself.

3. Open https://stats.your-domain.com/ in your browser. The installer asks for a one-time setup code — open storage/install-token.txt in your file manager and paste it (proves it's you, not a stranger who found the URL first). It then checks your server, creates your login and first site, and walks you through the last three steps on screen: paste the tracking snippet into your site (purge your site's cache after — caching plugins keep serving the old pages), add the every-minute cron job (it hands you the exact command — choose "Custom" if your panel asks, and set every schedule field to "Every…"), and sign in. No cron yet? Stats still refresh whenever you open the dashboard, and it reminds you with the exact line until the job runs.

Everything runs on SQLite — no database to create. Details and troubleshooting in deploy/shared-hosting.md.

Updates are one click too. When a new release is out, the dashboard shows a banner (and Account shows the version) — the admin hits Update now and the instance downloads the release, swaps itself in place, and migrates. Your config, data, and .htaccess are never touched. Git checkouts update with git pull instead.

Quick start (local)

cd api && composer install && cp .env.example .env && php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate && php artisan melytics:user you@example.com
php artisan serve --port=8901
# separate shell
cd dashboard && npm install && npm run dev   # proxies /api → :8901

Want the dashboard full of realistic data (like the screenshots above)?

cd api && php artisan db:seed --class=DemoSeeder && php artisan melytics:rollup --hours=2208
# log in as demo@melytics.dev / demopass1234

Build the tracker: cd tracker && npx esbuild src/m.js --minify --format=iife --outfile=dist/m.js

Install on a site

<script defer src="/js/app-m.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_KEY"></script>
<noscript><img src="/api/echo.gif?k=YOUR_SITE_KEY" alt=""></noscript>

Serve both paths first-party via the proxy rules in deploy/htaccess-proxy-template.txt — that's what makes capture ad-blocker-resistant.

Privacy model

• Tier 1 (always, consentless): no cookies, no fingerprinting, no PII. Uniques via a daily-rotating salted hash; IP used in-memory only.
• Tier 2 (opt-in, consent-gated): retention, cohorts, loyalty and attribution via a persistent localStorage visitor id, sent only after melytics.consent(true) (hook it to any CMP) and stored only for sites with the Privacy toggle enabled. melytics.consent(false) wipes the id. Ask for consent only where the law requires it — geo-gate the prompt client-side (e.g. by IANA timezone).

License

AGPL-3.0. Self-host freely; if you offer melytics as a hosted service with modifications, you must share those changes under the same license.