I Have No Idea How Many People Use My Clock. I Prefer It That Way.

I run a small fullscreen clock site. No accounts, no ads, and — this is the part that still feels slightly uncomfortable to admit — no analytics. Not a stripped-down analytics setup, not a self-hosted privacy-friendly one. None at all. I genuinely do not know how many people open it in a given week, which theme they pick most, or whether anyone has ever kept it running for more than five minutes.

The decision was easier to make than to live with

Leaving analytics out was the easy part. The tool's whole pitch is that nothing about your session gets recorded anywhere, and adding a tracking script — even a polite one — would have made that claim false the moment someone opened dev tools. So there was never really a choice to make.

Living without the data afterward has been the harder part. Every small decision I've made since — which theme to add next, whether the seconds toggle should default on or off, whether the flip animation is too slow — has been made on vibes, a handful of emails, and my own daily use. No funnel, no drop-off chart, no usage breakdown to lean on when I second-guess myself.

What you do instead

A few things filled the gap, none of them satisfying in the way a dashboard is satisfying:

• I read every email that comes in twice, because there are maybe two or three a month, and each one is doing the job that a thousand data points would normally do elsewhere.
• I use the thing myself, on a spare monitor, most days. It's a small sample size of one, but it's the only sample size I have any confidence in.
• When someone reports something oddly specific — a theme that's hard to read at 2am, a layout that breaks on an old tablet — I treat that single report as disproportionately important, because it's rare enough to be the whole signal I've got.

The trade I'm actually making

I'm not going to pretend this is purely a principled stand. Some of it is genuinely just the tool being small enough that I can afford not to know. If this were a business with a team and a roadmap to justify, I doubt I'd hold the line the same way.

But the more I sit with it, the more I think the discomfort is doing something useful. Not knowing forces every change to be justified on its own, in plain language, rather than defended with a chart that happens to say what I already wanted to hear. It's slower. It's occasionally just wrong. It also means the thing I shipped is exactly what it claims to be, for anyone who checks.

The clock I run with none of this instrumentation attached is at https://digitalclock.xyz/, if you want to see what a page with genuinely nothing behind it looks like. I'd still like to hear from you if something about it is broken — that's still, for now, the only channel I've got.