GoatCounter CSV exports – what are your use cases?

[arp242]

I'm going to make a change that disables the storing of individual pageviews; instead it will rely only on "aggregate counts" as you see on the dashboard. These are already stored separately, and the only functionality where individual pageviews are ever used is for the CSV export.

There are two reasons I'd like to remove this:

• Collecting only "aggregate counts" fits better with GoatCounter's view of "we just count a few things rather than track people".

• This is a somewhat expensive feature to support, both in terms of hosting goatcounter.com, but also in terms of development – removing it would be a lot easier than keeping it as an optional feature.

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But removing this will break the CSV export; that data simply won't be available any more. For most uses, I think that's a good thing because it wasn't using this data in the first place.

I don't necessarily mind keeping this as an optional feature, but it's not entirely clear to me this is actually useful.

So my question is: What are your use cases for the CSV exports? Would the API cover this? If not, is there something that can be changed/added in the API? I have a suspicion that most uses of the CSV export are really due to deficiencies elsewhere that can be fixed/added, but I need some more information on real-world use cases to be sure.