StatHat

» see stathat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

StatHat did one thing. You sent it a number from inside your code, one line, with no schema to define first, and it drew you that number over time. Anomaly detection and forecasts arrived later, but the core of the pitch never moved: count something, watch the curve.

Patrick Crosby built it. He had been CTO at OkCupid, and that is where the idea came from, an internal tool the site had used since it launched in February 2004 to watch thousands of its own numbers in real time. StatHat was that tool turned into a product, incorporated as Numerotron, with seed money from the OkCupid founders.

It ran from 2011 to 2026. Fifteen years is a considerable run for a developer tool with no obvious moat, and for most of them StatHat was simply there, the sort of service you wire up once and then stop thinking about.

~ the record ~

~ the go years ~

On 19 December 2011 the official Go blog published a post by Crosby titled Building StatHat with Go. That is unusual placement. Go had only been public since November 2009, almost nothing serious was running on it yet, and the language team needed evidence that it worked outside Google.

Crosby had some. He had put a Go web app called Langalot online in February 2010, four months after the language was released, and it was still up. StatHat's backend was Go throughout, and the post walked through why it had beaten the Rails and Node options they tested. For a few years, if you wanted to name a company running Go in production, StatHat was one of the handful you could reach for.

~ the price of a graph ~

What people remember alongside the graphs is the bill. $99 a month is the figure that came up when the shutdown hit Hacker News, and the comment underneath it was the familiar one: they liked the product and they left on price. Prometheus and Grafana turned up and were free, and the market for a hosted counter that charged real money narrowed every year after that.

I never ran StatHat and would not have. The work I do does not reach for a hosted counter, and by the time I needed metrics on anything the default had already shifted to running your own collector on your own box. A monthly invoice for a graph was a 2012 proposition.

~ the export window ~

The notice went up around 4 March 2026 and gave thirty days. "StatHat will be shutting down in 30 days on April 4, 2026. Until then, you can export all of your data." That is the whole text. No letter about the journey, no acquirer to thank, just the date and an export link.

Somebody posted it to Hacker News on 4 March. It collected eight points.

~ what the shutdown did not say ~

No reason was ever published. There was nobody to name as a buyer and no final post about what became of Numerotron, and the domain stopped resolving some time after April. What survives is the blog post from 2011, a snapshot of a language still assembling its case, reaching for a small company in Illinois that counted things on behalf of other people.

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