I needed comments for my static website and I was disqusted by the available options. So I decided to build a service for people like me who value meaningful conversations, but are not willing to sacrifice their privacy and that of their readers.
Sign-up to be notified when I'm ready to launch
Sign up, add three lines of code to your template and you're good to go.
Your users don't need to sign up to leave a comment. That's not even an option.
No tracking whatsoever, not even Google Analytics!
Pricing is fairly simple: you pay based on how many pageviews your website gets, because that's the biggest expense: the more pageviews that need to be served, the more the infrastructure has to scale.
If you pay for a full year in advance, you get 12 months for the price of 10.
Less than 1,000 pageviews per day
Less than 10,000 pageviews per day
Everybody else
Why should I pay for YAKS instead of using something free?
Because running a service costs money, so if you're not paying for a service you use, you gotta wonder where the money's coming from. And more often than not it's coming from tracking users and selling their data and browsing habits to advertisers and other third parties.
What data do you collect?
When you signup I ask you for your billing details, your email and your website address. Then when you access your dashboard I install a cookie to keep you logged in.
As for people accessing your website, I DO NOT track them at all, I don't care about them. If they decide to leave a comment, I'll install a cookie to store their name and email so they don't have to type it every time they leave a comment on YOUR website. That cookie can only be accessed when leaving comments on your website. On top of this I temporarily store a commenter's IP and User Agent for spam filtering, but once that's done, I immediately discard the data.
Do you offer a free plan?
Unfortunately not. I think the cheapest plan is really quite cheap and it should accomodate most websites.
Running a service costs money and I want to be sure nobody wonders where's the money coming from.
Does it work with Hugo? Jekyll? Hexo? etc
Sure it does, that's exactly what I built it for. It could even run on Wordpress, even though it probably wouldn't make much sense.
YAKS was built for people who want to add comments to their static blogs and all you need to do is add a few lines of Javascript to your template to start accepting comments.
How can I contact you?
Just send an email to m at finotto.io.