01 THE PROBLEM & MOTIVATION
Why we had to
build this.
Signal is a lightweight, cookie-free product intelligence pipeline. It captures client and server interactions, applies automatic PII stripping, buffers events at the edge, and streams them into ClickHouse or DuckDB for millisecond-latency cohort queries.
The Core Problem:
Enterprise analytics tools like Segment or Amplitude are notoriously expensive, invasive to user privacy, and create siloed data. Signal gives you full ownership of your event stream with zero third-party tracking scripts.
Who it is built for:
- Privacy-conscious SaaS companies compliant with GDPR & HIPAA
- Data teams wanting raw SQL access to event streams without ETL lag
- Founders seeking a lightweight, self-hosted product telemetry pipeline
02 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
How the pieces
fit together.
Client SDK dispatches compressed beacon batches to Cloudflare / Vercel Edge Workers, which redact sensitive fields and sink directly into ClickHouse.
Telemetry SDK
Tiny 1.2kB script with backpressure and offline buffering
Edge Filter
IP anonymization, user-agent hashing, and PII redaction
Columnar Store
Hyper-fast aggregation on billions of events
Query Canvas
Self-serve funnel and retention dashboard
03 CORE CAPABILITIES
Designed for
real production.
Zero-Cookie Attribution
Anonymous daily rotating hashes that track unique sessions without storing persistent cookies on the user machine.
signal.track('signup_started', {
source: 'organic_search',
intent: 'developer_tier'
})Instant Funnel & Retention Queries
Pre-computed materialized views answer complex 90-day cohort retention questions in under 30ms.
Automated PII Sanitization
Guaranteed prevention of emails, credit cards, or query params leaking into the analytics store.
Globally distributed
80% smaller than GA4
Over 50M rows
No consent banners needed
04 PUBLIC ROADMAP
What's shipped and
what is next.
DuckDB In-Browser SQL Explorer
Run ad-hoc queries locally over exported JSONL event dumps.
Live User Journey Graph
Sankey diagram visualization of user drop-offs.
Automated Anomaly Detection
Statistical alert engine for conversion rate dips.
05 JOIN THE LAB
Contribute to
Signal.
Whether you want to file an issue, submit a design example, optimize an edge route, or write documentation, all contributions are welcomed and credited.