Stepping down from Fathom

By Danny van Kooten on on Permalink.

Update (Mar 2021): After my departure, the open-source version of Fathom was discontinued. I've since started Koko Analytics as an open-source alternative.

I have an announcement to make. Less than a year ago, Paul Jarvis and I started working on Fathom (simple and transparent website analytics).

We managed to make a lot of progress during our first year and I'm more than a little proud of what Fathom is today. I'm running it on most of my sites and I'd say it's very much a viable alternative for Google Analytics for a lot of websites already.

Fathom screenshot

The open-source community around Fathom is very much alive and kicking. The GitHub repository for Fathom currently boosts over 5.000 GitHub stars and Fathom has been a trending Go project for pretty much every week over the last year!

And the Docker image has been pulled over a million times, even though Fathom is already a single static binary that is super easy to deploy to your infrastructure of choice. There's even a one-click installer if you're on DigitalOcean.

The software we built proved very effective in terms of performance. A single $5 VPS can easily handle tens of millions of pageviews per month, as proved by some of the bigger customers on Fathom's PRO plans.

Stepping down

To think that Fathom would be so well received and grow so rapidly during its first year is amazing and I'm super proud to have been a part of that.

Have been, because going forward, I will not be actively involved with Fathom anymore. Fathom itself is not going anywhere though. Paul is now joined by Jack Ellis with whom he will be continuing the project. Having seen them work together during the handover phase, I completely trust in their abilities to keep making Fathom better.

I am a little sad to leave Fathom behind but juggling its responsibilities with being a newbie dad and running Mailchimp for WordPress while also wanting to spend less time behind a computer proved way harder than anticipated.

At the same time, I'm stoked to see their plans unfold over the next few months. I'm confident they will take good care of what we managed to build over the past year.


Comments are welcome. You can email me at hi @ this domain.