MouseStats is shutting down.
Back in 2012, we started with a simple idea: to make understanding how people use websites easier for everyone. We launched a basic heatmap tool, and things just took off from there! We loved tackling all the challenges and grabbing the opportunities that came our way.
We're super proud to have been among the very first to offer affordable, yet innovative UX analytic tools. It was awesome to empower people with UX analytics through pricing that was transparent and fair. Our features — unlimited domains, unlimited sharing, our introduction of interactive heatmaps (AreaStats), affordable visitor recordings, form analytics, surveys, and project-based sharing with one-click URLs — were all designed to make powerful insights accessible to all.
It was seriously inspiring to see brands like Adidas, Stack Overflow, Movistar, and tons of others using MouseStats to make their user experiences better. We were so busy scaling and trying to provide as much value as we could that keeping up with the growing list of users was a happy "problem" to have!
Behind the scenes, things got pretty intense (but in a good way)! Managing 9TB+ of databases (all of which are cleaned up as you read this, per our commitment to user privacy) and serving 25 million hits a day with a small team definitely kept us on our toes. We optimized MongoDB like crazy to store vast amounts of user analytics data—cursor movements, HTML snapshots (with all the resources!), every single HTML change and support all sorts of UI frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, iframes) and browsers our customers were building their web applications on, all while keeping up with evolving browser cookie policies and CORS changes. It was a wild ride!
We were really driven to offer a modern, valuable product with pricing that felt honest and transparent, giving folks an alternative to the more expensive options out there. We treasure the freedom we had to innovate and the loyal community that got our perspective on UX analytics.
As the world began to reevaluate the importance of privacy in practice, particularly accelerated by events like the Snowden/PRISM revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, our own perspectives evolved as well. The PRISM case, with its exposure of government surveillance programs, served as a powerful reminder of how things can be abused even within "normal" boundries. Our core team members' personal values and perspectives on privacy drastically shifted over the years, mirroring the broader public sentiment. This internal change, fueled by a greater awareness of the potential moral implications, as demonstrated by Cambridge Analytica, drove us to proactively implement features like default text input masking without any option to disable it for any country (not only EU). We prioritized privacy-preserving analytics not as a reaction to legislation like GDPR – although we certainly welcomed its aims – but because it fundamentally aligned with our evolving core beliefs. We saw this as the right thing to do.
While we know we could keep innovating with MouseStats, we've decided to chase a larger vision: to make a broader impact on the world. Several years ago, we started transitioning MouseStats to Long-Term Support (LTS) with the eventual goal of sunsetting the service. Now, we're ready to pour our efforts into new ventures that vibe even better with our evolving values.
So, at 2:34 AM ICT on January 1, 2025, we're officially saying goodbye to MouseStats after 12 years. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being part of this adventure. Thanks for letting us build cool stuff with you. It's been real!
With love and gratitude,
Koosha, the Founder