▦ Abacus

Real analytics — sent to your inbox every day.

Privacy-first, cookie-free web analytics with a daily email digest. A lightweight, self-hostable alternative to Google Analytics — built entirely on the Cloudflare edge.

abacuslytics.com · Live demo · Report a bug · Request a feature

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Why Abacus?

Most analytics tools bury the truth under dashboards you never open and cookies you have to apologize for. Abacus keeps it to the metrics that matter — visitors, pageviews, top pages, sources, countries — and brings them to you: drop in one tiny script and wake up to a clean summary of yesterday in your inbox.

• 📨 Daily email digest — the whole story in the time it takes to drink your coffee. No login required.
• 🍪 No cookies, no consent banners — nothing personal is stored, so there's nothing to consent to. GDPR / CCPA / PECR friendly by design.
• ⚡ Sub-1KB script — async, no layout shift, won't dent your Core Web Vitals.
• 🌍 Runs on the edge — fast ingestion everywhere, and your data stays yours.
• 📈 One screen, no maze — visitors, sources, pages, countries and goals, minus the GA4 labyrinth.
• 🔒 Privacy by design — visitor counts use a daily-rotating, irreversible hash. We literally can't follow anyone across sites or days.

How it works

            ┌────────────────────── one Cloudflare Worker ──────────────────────┐
 your site  │                                                                   │
 <script>───┼──▶ /api/event ──▶ Workers Analytics Engine (raw events)           │
            │                                   │                               │
 dashboard ◀┼── Astro SSR ◀── D1 (sites, rollups, subscriptions) ◀── nightly cron│
            │                                   │                               │
 inbox  ◀───┼──────────────── Resend ◀── nightly cron (digest) ◀────────────────┘
            └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Raw pageview/event hits stream into Workers Analytics Engine (cheap, high-volume time series). A nightly cron rolls each day's data into D1 (SQLite) for historical ranges and emails every subscriber their digest via Resend. The live dashboard queries Analytics Engine directly.

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Framework	Astro 6 (SSR) → a single Cloudflare Worker
Auth	Clerk
Event store	Workers Analytics Engine
App data	D1 (SQLite) via Drizzle ORM
Email	Resend
Styling	Tailwind v4 + a hand-built editorial design system
Tooling	Bun workspaces monorepo

Repository layout

apps/web            Astro app → the single Worker (marketing + dashboard + /api/event + cron)
packages/tracker    Embeddable, dependency-free tracking snippet → builds to apps/web/public/abacus.js
packages/db         Shared D1 schema (Drizzle) + migrations

The Worker's custom entrypoint (apps/web/src/worker.ts) exposes both a fetch handler (Astro) and a scheduled handler (the nightly digest), so everything ships as one deploy.

Quick start

Prerequisites: Bun 1.3+, a free Clerk app, and (optionally) a Resend account for the email digest. Deploying needs a Cloudflare account.

git clone https://github.com/abacuslytics/abacus.git
cd abacus
bun install

1. Configure keys

Clerk reads its keys from Vite (import.meta.env), so they go in apps/web/.env:

cat > apps/web/.env <<'EOF'
PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=pk_test_xxx
CLERK_SECRET_KEY=sk_test_xxx

# Optional: work on the dashboard/demo without signing in
PUBLIC_DISABLE_AUTH=true
EOF

Cloudflare runtime bindings (D1 / Analytics Engine / Resend / the visitor-hash salt) go in apps/web/.dev.vars — copy the example and fill it in:

cp .dev.vars.example apps/web/.dev.vars

ℹ️ .env and .dev.vars are git-ignored — never commit real keys.

2. Build the tracker, set up the database

bun run tracker:build     # builds apps/web/public/abacus.js
bun run db:generate       # generate SQL from the Drizzle schema (already committed)
bun run db:migrate        # apply migrations to a local D1 database
bun run db:demo           # (optional) seed the public "live demo" site with data

3. Run it

bun run dev               # http://localhost:4321

Analytics Engine note: AE has no local query API — writeDataPoint runs locally but is a no-op for reads. With PUBLIC_DISABLE_AUTH=true and the seeded demo data, you can explore the full dashboard offline; live numbers require deploying with CF_ACCOUNT_ID + CF_AE_API_TOKEN.

Install snippet (for site owners)

<script defer data-domain="yourdomain.com" src="https://abacuslytics.com/abacus.js"></script>

Track custom goals with the global helper:

<button onclick="window.abacus('signup')">Sign up</button>

SPA route changes are counted automatically. Exclude yourself with localStorage.abacus_ignore = 'true', or skip paths with data-exclude="/admin/*".

Configuration reference

Variable	Where	Purpose
PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY	.env	Clerk frontend key
CLERK_SECRET_KEY	.env	Clerk backend key
PUBLIC_DISABLE_AUTH	.env	Dev-only: bypass Clerk and use a fixed dev user
VISITOR_HASH_SALT	.dev.vars / secret	Salt for the daily-rotating visitor hash
RESEND_API_KEY	.dev.vars / secret	Sends the daily digest + early-adopter signups
RESEND_AUDIENCE_ID	.dev.vars / secret	Resend audience for early-adopter signups
CF_ACCOUNT_ID / CF_AE_API_TOKEN	.dev.vars / secret	Query Analytics Engine via its SQL API

Deploying

# create the remote resources (one time), then paste their IDs into apps/web/wrangler.jsonc
wrangler d1 create abacus-db
wrangler kv namespace create SESSION
# create an "abacus_events" Analytics Engine dataset in the Cloudflare dashboard

# set production secrets
wrangler secret put CLERK_SECRET_KEY
wrangler secret put RESEND_API_KEY
wrangler secret put VISITOR_HASH_SALT
# …etc

bun run deploy            # builds the tracker + Astro, then `wrangler deploy`

Roadmap

• Weekly / monthly digest cadences
• Custom events & goal conversion funnels
• Team members & shared sites
• Public dashboards
• Import from Google Analytics / Plausible
• First-class WordPress / Next.js / Ghost plugins

Have an idea? Open an issue — we'd love to hear it.

🤝 Contributing

Abacus is early and contributions of every size are welcome — code, docs, design, bug reports, or just telling a friend.

1. Fork the repo and create a branch: git checkout -b feat/my-thing
2. bun install, then bun run dev to work locally (set PUBLIC_DISABLE_AUTH=true to skip auth)
3. Before pushing: bun run typecheck should pass
4. Open a pull request describing the change

Good first contributions: new tracker plugins, dashboard widgets, digest email polish, docs, and accessibility fixes. Look for issues tagged good first issue.

💜 Support the project

If Abacus is useful to you, the best ways to help:

• ⭐ Star the repo — it genuinely helps others find it
• 🐛 File issues and help triage
• 🛠️ Send a PR — even a typo fix counts
• 📣 Spread the word — a blog post or tweet goes a long way

License

Abacus is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE. In short: it's free and open source, and if you run a modified version as a network service, you must share your changes under the same license. (Same spirit as Plausible and PostHog.)

Acknowledgements

Built with Astro, the Cloudflare Developer Platform, Clerk, Drizzle ORM, Resend, and Chart.js. Inspired by the lovely simplicity of Plausible.

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