Analytics & Telemetry

What is collected

On successful project creation, the CLI sends one anonymous event with:

• Selected options (stack choices), including: frontend, backend, runtime, database, orm, api, auth, payments, addons, examples, dbSetup, webDeploy, serverDeploy, packageManager, git, install
• Environment data: cli_version, node_version, platform
• How the CLI was driven (mode): interactive prompts, flags, --yes, JSON output, the programmatic API, or the MCP server

Not collected:

• Project name, path, or file contents (explicitly omitted)
• Nested addon or database provisioning options
• Secrets or environment variables from your machine
• IP addresses or persistent project/user identifiers

Diagnostic events

Separately from the project-creation event, the CLI sends one anonymous cli_failed event to the same self-hosted Umami instance that powers the website analytics when create or add fails. It exists to catch problems the success event cannot show and contains: the command, how the CLI was driven, the stage that failed (for example template-generation, file-writing, database-setup, addons-setup, dependency-installation, git-initialization, directory, validate), the error class, the package manager and backend when known, and a scrubbed one-line reason with quoted names, paths, URLs, and emails replaced by placeholders. Cancelled runs send nothing.

Umami derives coarse location (country, region, city) from the request IP and a session hash from IP and user agent that rotates monthly; the IP address itself is not stored. The event never includes project names, paths, file contents, or full error messages. The same BTS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 switch and the --disable-analytics flag turn it off.

Disable telemetry

Telemetry is enabled by default. To disable:

BTS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 npx create-better-t-stack@latest

Add export BTS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 to your shell profile to make it permanent.

The CLI also honors the cross-tool DO_NOT_TRACK=1 convention, so one variable can turn off telemetry for every tool that supports it. The --disable-analytics flag skips it for a single run.

Where to view analytics

• Charts: /analytics
• Shared website analytics: Umami dashboard (self-hosted on a Hostinger VPS). Besides page views, the website records anonymous interaction events: builder selections, presets, command copies, share actions, docs actions, and outbound link clicks. Event names and their properties are defined in apps/web/src/lib/analytics.ts.
• Aggregate JSON snapshot: https://r2.better-t-stack.dev/analytics-data.json
• Aggregate CSV export: https://r2.better-t-stack.dev/export.csv

Notes:

• Aggregates are updated atomically with each accepted event
• Incoming values are checked against a bounded schema before storage
• Raw data is not publicly exposed; the /analytics page presents only summary statistics

Full transparency

One project event per successful scaffold plus one failure event when a scaffold breaks; no project identifiers. See source code below.

If in doubt, set BTS_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 and proceed. You can still use all CLI features.

Source code

• CLI event sender: apps/cli/src/utils/analytics.ts
• CLI diagnostic events: apps/cli/src/utils/diagnostics.ts
• Telemetry toggle logic: apps/cli/src/utils/telemetry.ts
• Ingest endpoint: packages/backend/convex/http.ts
• Analytics backend (ingest + aggregation): packages/backend/convex/analytics.ts