Pendo

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Build the product analytics I actually need instead of Pendo — and be clear that the guide half is the hard half.

**Retroactive tagging is the feature.** Pendo records every interaction and lets you name it later, so a question asked today is answered with last year's data. A homemade version records the events you thought of, and the answer to a new question starts from zero.

What is realistic to build:

STACK
- Node 20+ with Fastify
- SQLite through better-sqlite3, WAL mode
- A small script on the page, no framework
- Caddy in front

THE PART THAT WORKS
- events: id, person_hash, session_id, name, path, props_json, at
- An autocapture script recording clicks with a stable selector path, page views, and route changes — that is the retroactive half, approximated: **store the selector, name it later**
- Funnels and retention computed at query time, never stored as aggregates
- A person identified by your own account id once they sign in, and by a first-party cookie before

AUTOCAPTURE, WHICH IS WHERE THIS IS WON OR LOST
- The selector must survive a redeploy. Prefer a data attribute, then an id, then a short structural path — never a generated class name, which changes with every build
- Cap the payload: a page with a thousand elements must not send a thousand events
- **Never capture the contents of an input, ever.** One password or one card number in your event store and the store is a liability. Deny by default and allow specific fields deliberately

THE GUIDES, HONESTLY
- A tooltip anchored to a selector, a modal, a checklist. All easy to draw and all fragile: the anchor breaks silently when the frontend changes, and a guide pointing at nothing is worse than no guide
- Show rules — first session, plan, feature flag, seen count — and a frequency cap per person
- **A guide must render nothing rather than something wrong**: if the anchor is missing, log it and skip. Then alert on it, or you will find out from a customer

WHAT YOU CANNOT REALISTICALLY BUILD
- An editor where a product manager places a guide by pointing at the live application without a developer. That is a browser extension plus a visual selector picker plus a preview environment, and it is most of the product

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Autocapture with stable selectors and a hard rule against capturing input values. If you get the second one wrong, the first one stops mattering.