Jack Ellis

Jack Ellis is a software engineer, technical writer and teacher who owns and runs Fathom Analytics, a simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. He worked as a freelance developer before joining Fathom in early 2019.

Fathom started in 2018, when designer and author Paul Jarvis shared a mockup of a simpler analytics dashboard and built an open-source first version with developer Danny van Kooten. Danny stepped away, and Jack, who lived near Paul in Canada, came on as technical co-founder. Recurring revenue grew quickly after that. Fathom has never taken outside capital. It is customer-funded and reports thousands of paying customers.

Jack is known for openly sharing the infrastructure behind Fathom: a Laravel application deployed serverlessly on AWS with Laravel Vapor, its move from DynamoDB to SingleStore for analytics data, and the custom-domain and EU data isolation features that keep it privacy-friendly. He has turned that experience into two paid courses for Laravel developers, Serverless Laravel and SingleStore for Laravel, which he says have taught more than 1,300 developers.

In October 2024 Jack agreed to buy out Paul Jarvis, who wanted to retire. He took full control of Fathom on 1 December 2024 and planned to invest more in enterprise sales, paid advertising and sponsorships.