What we count
Live · This works today.
GardenTrack counts four things itself: how many people open the app, how many start setting up a garden, how many finish, and how many make an account — a random number, which of the four happened, and when, no name or email. Separately, PostHog, our analytics tool, sees pages opened, taps and errors; in the app every word is hidden and every photo is blocked before it can record your screen. On the website only, Ahrefs Web Analytics counts page visits, with no cookies.
The four numbers
Opened the app · started setting up · finished setting up · made an account.
That is the whole list. Not which screens you looked at, not how long you stayed, not what you tapped.
What made this worth doing
Somebody opens GardenTrack, sees the setup questions, and closes it again. Until this shipped, that person left no trace whatsoever — the server did not hear about anybody until the email screen, and they never got there.
They are the most useful person in the app and we could not see them at all.
What it deliberately is not
No ad tracker, no pixel, no fingerprinting. The first-party count above happens on our own server, inside a request your app already makes, so nothing new loads on your phone and nothing waits on it.
And no cookie. A cookie holding a random number is a tracking cookie by any plain reading. The number sits with your garden instead.
Ahrefs Web Analytics, on the website only
The website — never the app — also runs Ahrefs Web Analytics, which counts visits to each page: which page, where the visit came from, and the country your IP address points to. By Ahrefs’ own account it never stores the address itself, uses no cookies, and cannot follow a visitor from one day to the next. It has run since August, and the privacy page did not name it until September 24.
PostHog, separately
We also run PostHog, an analytics tool, on the site, the tools and the app — see Privacy for the full list of what it sees and never sees. In short: pages opened, taps and errors, and in the app a masked screen recording with every word hidden and every photo blocked. No name, no email. Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control turns it off entirely.
The app also tells PostHog which kind of thing happened — a plant added, a question asked — never the words. For each answer Rafe gives, PostHog gets which model answered, how long it took and how many tokens it used, never your question and never the answer.
Common questions
- What exactly is in one of these records?
A random number, which of four things happened, and when it happened. That is the entire row.
No name, no email, no location, no plants, no photos, nothing about your phone. We do not put your IP address in it either — though our host sees one on every request to every website you have ever visited, ours included, and always did.
The four things are: you opened the app · you started setting up a garden · you finished setting it up · you made an account.
- Where does the random number come from?
We invent it on your device the first time you open the app and keep it next to your garden.
⚠ It is not worked out from anything about you or your phone. That is the difference between a random number and a fingerprint, and it is the reason we can say we do not fingerprint anyone. Clear your browser data and it is gone and a new one starts. Open the app on a second phone and that is a second number, because there is nothing to join them with.
- Does it follow me around after I sign in?
No — it stops the moment you make an account.
By then it has done its job, and anything we might want to know about a signed-in gardener is answerable from the account itself. We could have written "we do not connect it to your account" and left it there. But after you signed in it would still have been traveling alongside your session, so that would have been a promise about what we choose to do rather than about what is possible. We stopped sending it instead.
- Why count anything at all?
Because until this shipped, somebody who opened GardenTrack, looked at the setup questions and left again was completely invisible to us. The server first heard about anybody at the email screen — so the people who never got that far left no trace, and those are exactly the people worth hearing from.
It is not for advertising, it is not sold, and it goes to nobody. We count it ourselves, in a request the app was already making.
- You now use PostHog. What does it actually see?
Pages opened, buttons tapped, and errors — and in the app, a recording of your screen with every word hidden and every photo blocked before it is made. It never gets your name or your email; once you sign in, it is told only a random number for your account and which plan you are on.
The app also tells PostHog which kind of thing happened — a plant added, a question asked — never the words. For each answer Rafe gives, PostHog gets which model answered, how long it took and how many tokens it used — never your question and never the answer.
Turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control and it never loads for you at all. It only ever runs on gardentrack.app, never while we are building or testing.
- Your privacy page used to say you ran no analytics. What changed?
We started using PostHog, so that sentence stopped being true, and we changed the page in the same breath as the code.
A privacy page describing tracking we did not do yet would be exactly as wrong as one denying tracking we did. The replacement is more specific rather than vaguer — "no analytics" sounds strong and tells you nothing, because you have to guess what we mean by it. What is there now names PostHog and says exactly what it sees.
What has not changed: no ad trackers, no pixels, no fingerprinting, and nothing sold to anyone.
- Can you tell it was me?
Not from the first-party count — there is nothing in a record to look at. The number is random and the row holds nothing else: no name, nothing about your device, no address of any kind.
PostHog is different once you sign in, because we tell it a random number for your account so a returning gardener's sessions can be told apart — but never your name, email, or anything you typed or photographed.
If you want everything we hold about you, ask us and we will send it.
Shipped 2026-08-25. Last checked 2026-09-29. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.