# How to Vibe Code Your Own Cabin (and Stop Paying for It)

> Privacy-first, Google Analytics alternative

- Site: https://withcabin.com
- Category: Web Analytics & SaaS
- Verdict: **Solid side project** (82/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 2-3 weekends of focused work

## Verdict

Build a personal clone over a few focused weekends, but keep paying for the real service if you want zero maintenance and guaranteed historical uptime.

Building an analytics collector and dashboard is a classic full-stack side project. The hardest architectural nuance is designing the ingestion pipeline and deduplication logic without relying on cookies or storing IP addresses. An AI coding agent will scaffold the Next.js frontend, database schemas, and tracking script quickly, but you will need to manually refine the SQL aggregation queries to make sure dashboard load times stay snappy as traffic grows.

### What you can't replicate

- The exact brand equity, trust, and multi-year domain authority
- Billions of pre-existing customer tracking tags deployed globally

## What it does

A privacy-first, carbon-conscious web analytics platform that tracks standard web metrics without relying on cookies, browser fingerprinting, or IP tracking.

### Core features

- Lightweight (~1KB) cookieless/IP-less tracking script using navigator.sendBeacon
- Event ingestion API endpoint handling high-frequency POST hits
- Aggregated analytics dashboard for pageviews, unique visitors, countries, languages, devices, and UTM campaigns
- CO₂ emission estimation metrics via CO2.js integration
- Custom event tracking and attention-time tracking
- Weekly email reports and data export functions

## The business

### Pricing

- Basic: Free
- Pro: $19/mo

Founded 2020.
Team size: Solo-operated.

## The hard parts

- Designing a cookieless, IP-less visitor deduplication and uniqueness counting mechanism without violating privacy or inflating numbers
- Handling high-volume concurrent event ingestion writes on low-resource infrastructure
- Aggregating time-series analytics efficiently for dashboard charts without hitting query bottlenecks

## How to vibe code Cabin

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Runtime environment for local development
- GitHub (free): Version control and seamless deployment integration
- Cloudflare (free): Edge hosting for the API ingestion endpoint and static dashboard assets

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class multi-file agentic coding tool for scaffolding the complete analytics backend and dashboard interface
- Cursor: Ideal for iterative UI tuning on charts and dashboard components

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js (App Router) with Tailwind CSS and Recharts
- Backend: Next.js API Routes / Cloudflare Workers
- Database: Turso (SQLite at the edge for ultra-fast event logging and aggregations)
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: Stripe (skipped for personal self-hosted clone)
- Other: CO2.js for carbon footprint calculations, Resend for email reports

### Hosting

- Cloudflare (Hosting the Next.js application and serverless ingestion endpoints at the edge): $0-5/mo
- Turso (Serverless SQLite database storage for pageview events and aggregated stats): $0/mo

### Build guide

1. **Project Scaffolding & Database Schema** — Initialize the Next.js project with Tailwind CSS, configure Turso SQLite as the database, and set up better-auth for user management.

```
Create a new Next.js project configured with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and App Router. Set up Turso (libSQL) database integration using Drizzle ORM or Prisma. Define the schema for 'sites' (id, user_id, domain, created_at), 'pageviews' (id, site_id, path, referrer, country, browser, os, timestamp), and 'custom_events' (id, site_id, name, timestamp). Implement better-auth for secure admin login so only the owner can access dashboards. Ensure all setup files include robust error handling and TypeScript types.
```

2. **The Lightweight Tracking Script** — Build a vanilla JavaScript tracking snippet (~1KB) that hooks into page loads, reads non-identifying properties, and fires a beacon request.

```
Write a lightweight, dependency-free vanilla JavaScript tracking script designed to be embedded on external websites. The script should capture current pathname, document.referrer, screen resolution, browser language, and device type without using cookies, local storage, or IP addresses. It must use `navigator.sendBeacon()` with a fallback to `fetch(..., { keepalive: true })` to POST these attributes to our ingestion endpoint (`/api/collect`). Keep the uncompressed bundle size under 1.5 KB and document how users embed it with a single HTML script tag.
```

3. **High-Volume Event Ingestion API** — Create a high-performance ingestion endpoint that validates incoming tracking beacons and stores raw hit records efficiently.

```
Build a high-performance Next.js API route at `/api/collect` that accepts POST requests from the tracking script. Implement strict CORS handling to allow requests from any registered customer domain. Validate incoming payloads, extract country and region metadata from request headers (such as Cloudflare CF-IPCountry header without storing the raw IP address), and write the event record asynchronously to the Turso database. Ensure fast response times with minimal CPU overhead.
```

4. **Dashboard UI & Analytics Aggregations** — Build the main analytics dashboard views with charts for pageviews, unique visitors, devices, countries, and referral sources.

```
Build a responsive analytics dashboard in Next.js using Tailwind CSS and Recharts. Create views for a selected site showing summary metric cards (total pageviews, unique visitors, average attention time, CO₂ emissions) and interactive breakdown lists for top pages, referrers, countries, devices, and browsers. Write optimized SQL aggregation queries against the pageviews table for daily, weekly, and monthly time ranges. Include a date-picker filter component.
```

5. **Carbon Footprint Calculator & CO2.js Integration** — Implement the carbon footprint estimation module using CO2.js to calculate website energy consumption and CO₂ emissions based on page transfer size.

```
Integrate the `'@greenweb/co2js'` library into the backend and dashboard. Create a feature where users can input a URL or view estimated carbon emissions for their tracked pageviews based on data transfer volume and hosting green energy status. Display these metrics clearly on the dashboard with tips on reducing asset weight.
```

6. **Weekly Email Reports & Data Export** — Implement automated weekly email summaries and data export functionality (CSV/JSON).

```
Implement a CSV and JSON data export feature allowing users to download their raw analytics data for any date range. Set up an API route integrated with Resend to compile a weekly summary email containing total pageviews, top pages, and visitor growth, ready to be triggered via a cron job.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- Domain name (optional): $12/yr
- AI Coding Assistant subscription: $20
- Total: ~$32 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Cloudflare Workers & Turso Database: $0/mo (Free tiers)
- Total: ~$0/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $19/mo (Pro)
- Build time: 12-16 hours
- AI tool credits: $20 (Claude Code / Cursor Pro)
- Break-even: Free forever (self-hosted)

## Sources

- [Cabin Official Website](https://withcabin.com)
- [Cabin Pricing Page](https://withcabin.com/pricing)
- [Cabin: The next episode (Founder Announcement)](https://withcabin.com/news/cabin-the-next-episode)