Why I Built Ucoder Insights
I am a Computer Science student from West Bengal, India. The idea for Ucoder Insights started back in my 3rd year — long before it became any kind of formal project. Like most developers who love building, I spent weekends and late nights on side projects, developer utilities, and SaaS experiments, and kept running into the same wall every time.
The Problem: Expensive, Complex & Invasive Tools
Every time I launched a project, I wanted answers to straight forward questions: Which pages are being visited? Where are users clicking? Are there JavaScript errors breaking the UI in production?
Finding the answer was unexpectedly frustrating. Mixpanel asked for $20 to $50 a month before I had a single paying user. Google Analytics required complicated setups and invasive cookie banners that degraded page performance and scared privacy-conscious visitors away.
To get what I needed, I found myself combining three separate services: Mixpanel for page analytics, Hotjar for click behavior, and Sentry for error logs. That meant three different scripts slowing down my site, three dashboards to monitor, and three subscriptions.
Overkill pricing & enterprise complexity for indie makers.
Cookie banners, tracking scripts & privacy compliance headaches.
3 separate SDKs, 3 dashboards, 3 bills just to monitor 1 app.
The Decision: Build a Clean, Privacy-First Alternative
What started as a rough idea in my 3rd year grew into a plan I kept refining, and eventually into a production tool I actively rely on every day. I set strict technical constraints from day one:
- Zero Cookies & No IP Storage: Anonymous session tokens that reset per browser session with zero cross-site tracking.
- Ultra-Lightweight SDK (<8.6KB): Zero third-party dependencies to ensure zero lag on user sites.
- Asynchronous Batching: Using modern
navigator.sendBeaconso tracking never blocks page rendering. - IndexDB: Storing events in the browser until a batch is ready to be sent, ensuring no data loss even if the user closes the tab. If the user is offline, events are sent once they come back online.
- Unified Insights: Combining page views, rage & dead click detection, and JavaScript error capture in a single dashboard.
Building in Public & Open Source Core
Ucoder Insights is built on the philosophy that great developer tooling should be transparent. The core SDK and event tracking logic are 100% open-source so anyone can inspect exactly how their traffic is analyzed.
I didn't build this to compete with Mixpanel. I built it because I needed it, and I figured other developers probably do too.
