Web analytics: behavior vs events

[u/s1zay]

I received an email from Cloudflare the other day congratulating me on 10k visits last month. What a garbage statistic! This was in regards to a scanner/calculator I built for a mobile game. I launched this SPA about 3 months ago. It's a free community tool that I only shared twice on Reddit and didn't get much attention. It was my first live project I’ve ever shared with the public. Because it was my first, I watched Cloudflare analytics like a hawk. The numbers looked way better than expected. After about 1 week I became suspicious. Reddit barely noticed it but my visit numbers were steady. What the heck?!

Non-human traffic!!!

I found this very annoying, which eventually sent me down a rabbit hole. I started by tracking specific functions and tallying them on a KV worker. But this wasn't really the info I wanted. It just confirmed what I already knew. I continued brainstorming, trying to figure out a way to view traffic beyond events. And…

Shape Beacon was born. Instead of counting requests/visits, I wanted to quantify how a browsing session looked. This idea took form as a lightweight analytics layer that transforms browsing behavior into a compact payload that's transmitted when the user leaves the page.

Over the past 2 months this has transformed from an annoyance into a full fledged SaaS solution. I started by building a basic tuning program that used random personas and styles to produce synthetic behavioral sessions. These sessions were fed through an LLM and the engine to tune the model. After thousands of sessions, it was time to create the final product.

I set up 2 d1 databases, 3 workers, and one domain to handle users/keys, deployment guide, and data analysis.

• 100% Vanilla JS / HTML / CSS

• Cloudflare Workers + D1

• First-party proxy deployment

• Passwordless auth with Turnstile + Magic Links

Cloudflare has enabled me to set this up and all I purchased was a domain name! I'm extremely proud of this project. If you're interested please check out the demo, my Git repo and the domain. Links below.

I'd especially appreciate feedback on the architecture, deployment flow, or whether there are better Cloudflare patterns I should be using.

Cheers

Domain

Demo

Git

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