Hey, I'm Max

So here's the thing. I was building a React Native app and needed analytics. You know the drill — you look at Mixpanel, Amplitude, all the big names. They're great tools. But then you see the pricing page. Mixpanel charges $0.28 per 1,000 events — sounds cheap until your app does 10 million events a month and you're looking at a $2,500 bill. For tracking button clicks. Come on.

Then there's the privacy part. My app collects behavioral data from real users. Their screen views, their purchases, their search queries. And all of that sits on someone else's servers in some US data center? As a German dev, that gives me GDPR nightmares. I don't want to deal with DPAs and legal gray zones just to see how many people tapped "Add to Cart".

So I did what any developer would do — I built my own. Bananalytics is what came out of that frustration. A self-hosted analytics tool that runs on a $4/month VPS, gives you funnels, retention, live events, a world map, the whole deal. And your data never leaves your server.

The name? I was eating a banana while brainstorming names. "Banana + Analytics" sounded so stupid that it was perfect. Sometimes the best brand is the one that makes you smile.

I built this for developers like me. People who want real product insights without selling their users' data to big tech. People who'd rather spend 5 minutes with Docker than 5 meetings with a sales team. If that sounds like you, I think you'll like what I built.

It's fully open source, MIT licensed. Use it, fork it, break it, fix it. If you have ideas or find bugs, open an issue. I read every single one.

— Max