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·5 min read

Self-host so the visitor never becomes inventory

The same code runs on your laptop and in our cloud. The manifest does not change. That is the point of a clean-room server you can read.

Self-hostPrivacy

A small home server on a shelf beside books and a plant
The collection contract is identical on a shelf and in a region.

SaaS analytics has a quiet business model even when the marketing says “privacy first”: your traffic graph is still a dataset on someone else’s disk. Most vendors are decent. Decency is not a control. Self-hosting is. Vector 5 is written so the hosted product cannot grow a feature the self-hosted copy lacks — including the public collection manifest.

What does not change in the cloud

  • No cookies, no fingerprints, no stored IPs.
  • Daily-rotating visitor hash, salt never logged.
  • Insights, if enabled, still see aggregates only. Ollama still runs locally if you point it there.
  • Export JSON whenever you like. Import CSV when you arrive.

Supabase auth is how the hosted dashboard knows you. It is not how visitors are counted. Those paths do not share a table.

A visitor should never be a row you could sell, even if you wanted to.