Sharing dashboards without handing out logins

The most common thing people want to do with analytics, after looking at it themselves, is show it to someone who doesn't have a login. A client. A stakeholder. An advertiser. Sometimes the whole internet. Creating an account for each of those people is the wrong answer, so Tracely now has three ways to share without one.

Public dashboards

The blunt instrument: flip Public dashboard on in site settings, and anyone with the link can open /share/{site} — a read-only overview with the traffic chart, top pages, and top sources for the selected period. No sidebar, no settings, no exports, no raw drill-downs. It's the "our stats are public" mode that open-source projects and indie products like to run.

The link is a capability: anyone who has it can see aggregate metrics for that site, so treat it accordingly. Turning the toggle off is how you revoke access. And because everything on the page is aggregate — the same privacy posture as the rest of the product — going public doesn't expose anything about an individual visitor.

Magic links, for when public is too much

More often you want to show one person the numbers for a while. That's the magic-link share: from the site overview, pick an expiry between 1 and 30 days and click Create share link. You get a URL at /share/r/{token} that opens a read-only snapshot of the overview — headline metrics, traffic chart, top pages — on a guest layout, no account required.

Two deliberate design choices here. First, the full URL is shown exactly once, at creation. The token is hashed at rest, so the app couldn't show it to you again even if it wanted to — the same reasoning as API tokens. If you lose the link, you make a new one. Second, expired or incorrect tokens return a plain 404, not a "this link has expired" page. A wrong guess learns nothing, including whether a share ever existed.

Between the two, my rule of thumb: public dashboard for standing transparency, magic link for a conversation. The magic link expires on its own, which is the property you actually want when sharing with a client — nobody remembers to revoke things.

The trust badge

The third piece is smaller but I like it: an embeddable SVG badge at /embed/trust-badge.svg that links to the trust and compliance page. It's a plain SVG served with Content-Type: image/svg+xml, cacheable for a day, with X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff so it can't be coerced into something else. The trust page itself includes a copy-paste <img> + <a> snippet.

The idea is for sites that use Tracely because it's privacy-first and want to say so — a footer badge that tells visitors "this site's analytics are cookieless and aggregate-only" and links to the details. Analytics is usually something sites hide; if you picked yours specifically because it respects visitors, that's worth a badge rather than an apology.

The common thread

All three of these are read-only and aggregate-only, which is what makes them safe to build at all. There's no "share with edit access," no per-viewer permissions matrix, no guest seats. Sharing an analytics dashboard is fundamentally a publishing act, and modeling it that way — links you create, that show fixed views, that you can kill — keeps both the security story and the UI simple.

There's also a signed-URL live snapshot for embedding a minimal live view into internal tools, but that's a niche enough flow that I'll save it for its own note. The broader tour of what's shareable in the first place is on the features page.