No Cookie Banner, No Tracker: How We Built Our Own Analytics in a Day
Most analytics tools mean a cookie banner and a data-sharing decision you probably haven't reviewed. Here's how we built a ~2KB first-party alternative instead — no tracker, no banner, done in under a day.
If your website has a cookie banner, you've already told visitors — and any regulator who checks — that you're sharing their data with someone else.
We Wanted None of That Risk on Our Own Site
We build secure systems for clients, so running a third-party tracker on our own site never sat right with us. There was nothing to rip out — we never ran Google Analytics, a tag manager, or a session recorder. We just built our own first-party analytics from a blank page.
The Whole System: One Beacon, One Worker, One Table We Own
- A ~2KB beacon on each page that fires two events — page views and button clicks.
- A Cloudflare Worker that receives those events.
- One database table, owned entirely by us — no analytics vendor sitting in the middle.
Built and shipped in under a day.
Why We Don't Need a Cookie Banner
We honour Global Privacy Control (GPC) and identify visitors with a per-tab session ID instead of anything personal. No personally identifiable information means no consent is required under UK GDPR — so there's no banner, no "accept all" button, nothing for a visitor to click through.
The takeaway for any SME: every third-party script on your site is a decision about whose hands your customers' data passes through, whether you've reviewed it as one or not. Building it yourself isn't the only fix — knowing what's already running is the first one.
The One Real Engineering Snag
navigator.sendBeacon can't preflight, so it's still subject to CORS. Send it a JSON blob and the browser blocks the response. The fix was switching to a text/plain payload, which sidesteps the restriction. One format change accounted for most of the debugging time.
Why It Matters More Than It Looks
For a company selling secure systems, running zero third-party scripts isn't a compromise — it's the proof. We're not asking customers to trust a claim; we're showing them a site that doesn't hand their data to anyone else in the first place.
Check What Your Own Site Is Doing
Visit pharoahtechnology.co.uk/products and ask us to take a look at what your current analytics setup is actually collecting, and where it's going.