Thanks. Only reason I was “still using it” was the Wordpress plugin that I hadn’t bothered to remove – although I’ve removed it now (it might speed up page-load times a little).

Glad to hear about the volume issues they face…and glad I didnt risk my website with them.

Thanks for the warning.

I see it is active on this site and your last login was fairly recent so…. just curious.

First of all, when you emailed me, I did in fact look at your site’s traffic levels. You were over the free limit of 3000 daily page views for 12 of your 21 days on the trial. I’m not sure why I said you were over all but 2 days in my original response – it may be because your traffic before the spike was so small that I didn’t even notice it on the graph, because the spike was so big. (I just went back and looked at it now).

When a user’s trial ends, which is a fully automated process, the code looks at your site’s last 7 days of history to determine if you are eligible for the free service or not. Because your spike came during the second half of your trial, the code disabled your site and sent you the automated email.

Second, your claim that we have banned you is completely false. No such action occurred. We do have the ability to ban domains, but your site is not banned and never was, and in fact, your account is still active in our system, along with your disabled site.

Third, the reason I didn’t respond to your second email is because it was full of attitude that I didn’t wish to deal with. You conveniently left out the majority of that email, instead only quoting the first paragraph. As a reminder to yourself, and a convenience to your readers, I am posting the full content of your email below:

————–
Shrug. OK. I’ll disable it, and stop recommending GC. Thanks.

(FYI: I accidentally got a massive spike of traffic on a tiny blog – I
went from 10 hits a day to 50,000 a day – which made me realise that I
had no stats tracking, so I enabled GC. That traffic is now gone, it
was a flash-in-the-pan thing.)

FYI2: other than “disabling ads” (and the hits limit :)) I don’t see a
noticeable difference between GC free and premium. I don’t know what
your target market is, but if it includes people like myself, you
might want to provide a stronger differentiator.

FYI3: I found GC a year ago when I was reviewing the alternatives to
GA. Even at the time, I thought the daily page views limit seemed a
bit low; I felt you should be selling premium on added-value, rather
than on sheer “you have a lot of hits, so pay up”. There are free
alternatives that do more than GC right now, with no limits, so …

FYI4: I’ll be using custom awstats from now on. Takes me 10 mins to
setup on that server, but it’s free and has no limits. It lacks the
pretty graphs of GC, but it does some REALLY important things GC fails
on – like tracking “RSS clients vs. direct web clients”. It’s just
ugly :).
————–

Although it was fully of smiley face’s, the overall picture you were painting was that while you like the product, you don’t like the pricing (even though we are by far the cheapest paid analytics service around) and you get similar functionality elsewhere so why would you even bother using our service. Can you really blame me for not responding to that? Would you respond to an email like that? You said my email to you was snarky, which I don’t see at all, but then you reply with that and wonder why we didn’t respond?

Fourth, your claim that the only 2 things you get for paying are no ads and higher traffic are not true. Some of our most popular features, including Spy and Twitter analytics, are only available to paying accounts. This page summarizes the differences between free and paid accounts:

http://getclicky.com/help/pricing

Fifth, your claim that we removed the iPhone optimized version of our service… I don’t know even know where you’re coming up with this stuff. That has NEVER been removed and is still active and used by thousands of people every single day.

It’s true that we do not have an actual iPhone “app”, but a mobile optimized web site is a nice way to do things because it automatically works on every other platform that uses mobile safari (webkit) – Android, WebOS, and Symbian, to name a few. That immediately more than doubles the number of people who can use it, and the actual development of the mobile product is much easier to design as a web page than a real “app”. Sure it’s not as flashy, but it works well and people love it.

I’m not sure what happened to your email about developing an iPhone app yourself. The only email I have from you is the one you’re quoting from. You may have emailed my partner Noah instead. Either way, we do not intentionally ignore any emails. It may have just slipped through the cracks. WIth the volume of email we receive (over 100 per day), sometimes that just happens. I apologize for that, I assure you we would not have intentionally ignored it.

Sixth, I agree with your criticisms of our front page. It could be a lot better, and doesn’t clearly tell people why they should use us over someone else (except the chart at the bottom). We have wanted to fix it for a long time, but we’re growing real nice as it is already so it’s been hard to prioritize.

Last, your statement that we are “going out of business?”, well, I assure you this could not be further from the truth.

Although I do not feel we did anything wrong, I would like to make it up to you by offering you free Pro service indefinitely. I have upgraded your still existing account to Pro. Feel free to use it if you want. If not, just let me know and I’ll delete it.

Thanks. But please note: that is NOT an iPhone App – that’s a simple web frontend hacked on using iUI or similar to “pretend” to look like an iPhone App.

Since it is not an app, it’s got all the problems of a bookmarked webpage, e.g.:
– cannot provide the graphs from the website (since these are all Flash-based)
– cannot permanently remember account info (Apple’s safari automatically deletes this for websites periodically)
– requires full reload every time you access it, rather than merely downloading the “changed” data
– cannot cache the last-read data – requires a live internet connection to view stats (again, safari deletes the cache often, out of your control)
– cannot provide historic data beyond the few simple queries that the website already supports
- …etc

It’s definitely pretty, but (having used it) it’s not very useful. In the end, I actually found the main website version more useful – even on the iPhone!

Clearly, I wrote this post badly. The title was intended to be rhetorical – the blog post was intended to show that in the tough post-GA world of analytics, things weren’t looking good.

I’ve had a look around at competing services recently, and they’re adding a lot more features and volume (several times as much as GetClicky), while racing to lower costs further than each other. Not a good sign…

You had a problem – that’s it. Seriously look into what slander and defamation mean in legal terms.