The easy way to Build Your Own App or SaaS Analytics Dashboard with no third-party SDK | NerdSip
Developer • 9 min read<br>The easy way to build your own app and SaaS analytics Dashboard, without a third-party SDK
June 25, 2026 • by Philip, NerdSip Research Team
TL;DR
A beginner-friendly guide to first-party analytics so you can see what your users actually do. It runs on your own server with no third-party SDKs, so you own your data and pay nothing per event. Three steps: write your questions, define your metrics carefully, then have your AI agent build a small password-protected dashboard. Copy-paste prompts at the end build the whole thing.
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On this page
Chapter 1: The three steps
Build it up, one stage at a time
A peek at the tech, in plain words
A fair word on the limits
The prompts. Hand these to your agent.
Attention: this article ends with copy-paste prompts. If you just want the prompts, scroll to the bottom. If you want them to actually work, read the article first.
You have an app. People are downloading it. The number on the store page climbs, and that feels good.
So let me ask you something. Is it really working?
I do not mean "are downloads up." I mean the deeper kind of working. Of the hundred people who installed yesterday, how many came back and opened it a second time? How many reached the part you are most proud of? How many will still be around on Friday, and of those, how many did you pay to bring in and will quietly disappear?
If you paused before answering, you already know the feeling this guide is about. You are flying in fog. The instruments are dark. You are steering by the one light you can see, the download counter, and that light tells you almost nothing about where you are actually going.
Here is why that matters more than it sounds. Flying in fog is how good apps quietly die. You make calls on a hunch. You pour your next hundred dollars into the channel that looks busy instead of the one that actually sends people who stay. You celebrate a great week that was really just luck, and you miss the small leak draining users one screen before the part that would have hooked them. None of these feel like mistakes while you are making them. That is what the fog does. It lets you feel fine right up until the numbers that were never real catch up with you. Knowing what your users actually do is not a nice-to-have you get to later. It is the difference between steering and guessing.
The good news is that the fog is not permanent, and clearing it does not take an expensive tool or a data team. It takes three steps, a little honest thinking, and an afternoon with your AI agent.
Let me show you how.
Chapter 1: The three steps
First, who is talking, so you can weigh the advice. I am a developer. I run a handful of websites, a couple of SaaS products, and one genuinely complicated micro-learning app that lives in the App Store and Google Play. That app, with its onboarding flow, its free and paid tiers, and a real paywall, is where every example in this article comes from. None of this is theoretical. It is the system I actually run to understand my own users, rebuilt here so you can copy it.
Everything fits into three steps. Write your questions. Define your metrics. Ask your AI agent to build it. Three steps, in order, and the order matters.
Step one: write down your questions
Before any code, write the questions that decide whether you keep going. The honest ones, in order, because they form a chain. People find you, some open the app, some sign up, some do the thing your app is for, and a few pay. You want to see exactly where they fall away.
Here is the exact list I track, stage by stage. Yours will look almost the same.
1. Downloads. I barely care. A download is the easiest number to get and the easiest to fool yourself with. A surprising number of people install an app and never open it once. The icon sits on the home screen and that is the end of it. You do not even need to track this yourself, because the App Store and Google Play hand it to you for free. Glance at it, then look past it. Nothing to build here.
2. People who open the app and tell you where they came from. On page two or three of onboarding, ask one question: where did you find us? Google, ChatGPT, TikTok, Reddit, a friend. This might be the single most valuable slide in your entire onboarding. It does two jobs at once. It tells you which channels actually bring you humans, and the act of answering marks the first real user, the person who opened the app and engaged with it. That is my baseline, the true top of my funnel. Downloads are noise. This is the first real number. When you are ready to build it, paste prompt ATTRIBUTION from the end of this article into your agent.
3. People who create an account. Sign up with email, or continue with Google or Apple. This is the first hard commitment a user makes. The drop from stage 2 to stage 3 tells you whether...