We just launched a fun little tool called Phantom Analyzer. It’s a 100% serverless tool that scans websites for hidden tracking pixels.

I want to talk about how we built it 👇

The idea came about early this year after @mijustin gave us an idea about badges/certification, which developed into “what if we could scan websites for Google Analytics?!”. But we left the idea in Basecamp for many months.

Fast forward to Halloween, we’re thinking about fun ideas we could do to entertain people. We discussed “Phantom Analytics” in response to people getting confused with our product name, and had various ideas. And then we landed on the URL analyzer idea.

Once we’d finalized the spec, Paul got to work on our Halloween themed product and then coded up the HTML/CSS for it all. I then took it, put it into a Laravel application. Nice and easy.

Off the bat, I already knew the base stack I was using.

> Laravel Vapor
> ChipperCI for deployment
> SQS for queues
> DynamoDB for the database

We went with DynamoDB as we don’t want to worry about our database scaling!