In the past months, I got increasingly excited about simple, open source, self-hostable and privacy-friendly software. So, I’ve decided to start two side projects to solve some of my own problems.

Both projects are still under development and not launched yet. But because they’re open source, you can already check them out on GitHub.

The first one is a store finder and is called Mapzy (on GitHub). I’m working on it with my friend Sag, and we’re getting some help in the graphics department from my partner Dorena. We started Mapzy because I couldn’t find a simple and affordable store finder for our plant-based cheese company, Yeti.

The second project is a product analytics software and is called Fugu (on GitHub). Fugu helps you track your web or mobile app users with events in a privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant manner. I started it because I couldn’t find a privacy-friendly and simple event-based tracking software. I was using PostHog initially, but they quickly started adding too many features, making everything too complex. Furthermore, I was unhappy that they didn’t support privacy-friendly tracking out of the box.

For both software, we’ll offer a managed version where you pay a monthly subscription fee to use. Our servers are based in Germany. This is the best solution for most people, and not really more expensive than managing your own server. However, if you have stricter privacy needs, or want to run a custom version of the software, you can always host it yourself. The self-hosted versions will always be free with no restrictions.

I’ll be posting regular updates about these projects. The best way is to follow along on my Twitter. If you want to start using either of these projects already today, just email me.

PS: The fundamental idea of “simple, open source, self-hostable and privacy-friendly” was strongly inspired by Marko Saric, Uku Täht and their product Plausible Analytics. Thanks guys!