how do i know what to fix in my product? (analytics that gives a verdict)

your ai assistant admits it hallucinates your numbers. mine can't. it's a CI test. that is the whole difference, and it is why you can act on the answer instead of double-checking it. most analytics tools bolt an AI on top that generates a query against your data; a generated query is a second path, and it can disagree with your dashboard, so the model confidently returns a wrong number. smolanalytics does the opposite: its AI calls the exact same deterministic reports the dashboard renders, never generated SQL, so it returns the real computed number or nothing. that is not a promise in a README: a CI agreement test asks the same question through the dashboard's API and through the AI's channel, and fails the build if the two answers differ. on top of that, the dashboard opens with a verdict, a sentence that says what changed and what to fix, instead of a wall of charts. so "what should i fix?" has a trustworthy answer, right where you work.

how do i know what to fix in my product?

honestly, most tools do not tell you; they hand you charts and expect you to find it. that is the problem the verdict is built to solve.

open almost any analytics dashboard and you get a grid of graphs. the number is in there somewhere, but the tool has quietly outsourced the actual job (figuring out what changed and what it means) back to you. you came to find out what is wrong, and you leave with homework.

the verdict inverts that. the dashboard opens with a sentence, not a chart: what dropped, where the leak is, what to look at first. the charts are still there, underneath, as evidence. but the read comes first. the same thing is available as a tool your coding assistant can call, so the morning triage ("anything broken today?") runs without you opening a tab.

here is the shape of a verdict (example numbers; this launched recently and there is no real traffic worth quoting):

you ▸ what's broken today?
ai  ▸ one thing changed: signup is down [18%] vs a typical
      day ([94] vs [115]), starting around 14:00. tracking is
      healthy: all 6 planned events flowing, referrers normal.
      this is a product problem, not a tracking one. most useful
      action: check yesterday's deploy to the signup form.

what's wrong with my funnel?

that is exactly the question the product-analytics side answers, and it answers it as a read, not a chart.

funnels, retention, paths, and cohorts are all built in, on every plan, from the same events as the web analytics. so "where do people drop off after signup" is one question, and the answer names the step and the size of the leak rather than drawing you a bar chart to squint at. you can ask it from the dashboard's ask bar or from your editor, and either way the number is the real computed number.

can i just ask, in my editor?

yes; that is the intended way to use it. you run smolanalytics connect once, and your coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and other MCP clients) gets analytics as an MCP server: 47 tools and 13 built-in prompts. then you ship a feature and ask "did it work?" in the same window you wrote it, without alt-tabbing to a dashboard.

there are ready-made routines behind a slash: whats-broken-today is the morning triage, weekly-review is the recap a good cofounder would give you, instrument-my-app wires tracking on a fresh repo. each one calls the right tools in the right order and gives you the read, not a data dump.

why can i trust the number the AI gives me?

because the AI does not write a query, and there is a test proving its answers match the dashboard.

this is the load-bearing claim, so here is the mechanism. every other tool's AI assistant works by generating a query (PostHog's MCP, for example, lets the model write HogQL). a generated query is a second path to your data, and a second path can drift from what the dashboard shows, which is how these assistants hallucinate a number that looks plausible and is wrong. smolanalytics's MCP tools do not generate queries at all. they call the exact same deterministic report functions the dashboard renders, so there is no second path to disagree.

and that is enforced, not asserted. the agreement test seeds a server, asks the same question through the HTTP API and through the MCP server, and fails the build if the answers are not identical. it runs in CI on every commit, so the claim cannot quietly rot. the honest caveat: your model can still ask the wrong question. it just cannot invent the number.

how is this different from PostHog?

PostHog is deeper and does more: session replay, feature flags, the works. the difference that matters for "what do i fix" is three things it structurally cannot match, because matching them would break its business. its AI is metered (yours is free, you bring your own model), its assistant generates queries that can be wrong (ours calls deterministic reports and CI-checks them against the dashboard), and its data lives in its cloud (yours stays on your box). PostHog self-hosting is also a Kafka + ClickHouse cluster; this is one binary. the side-by-side is on smolanalytics vs PostHog.

if you want session replay or feature flags, use PostHog; those are on this tool's deliberate never-list and always will be. if you want a trustworthy answer to "what should i fix?" without an ops project or a metered AI, this is the trade.

what does it cost, and why should i believe any of this?

self-host is free forever, MIT, no gated features. the cloud is a 14-day full trial then $9/month on Solo (unlimited sites, 250k events), $5 per extra million, dashboard never locks.

on believing it: this is one person, it launched recently, there are no testimonials because there are none, and none will be faked. so trust does not come from a track record; it comes from the design. the agreement test is public and runs on every commit. the license is MIT with no CLA, so no relicense can touch the copy you run. worst case, the binary you already have keeps running on your data on your disk. the number cannot be made up, and that is the one property i would not ship without.

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the code and the agreement test are at github.com/Arjun0606/smolanalytics. if you want the verdict for your own product, try the cloud: 14-day trial, and tomorrow's brief tells you what to fix first.