How I Built a Funnel Analytics Engine with Laravel Horizon, Redis and a Dead-Simple REST API

Most analytics tools fall into one of two traps: they're either too shallow to be useful, or so complex that integration alone takes a sprint. I got tired of both. So I built my own. This is the story of how I built Tracetics — a funnel analytics engine for developers — and the technical decisions behind it. The Core Problem Funnel analytics sounds simple: a user does A, then B, then C. What percentage make it from A to C? Where do they drop off? In practice, it's surprisingly tricky to build well: Events arrive asynchronously and out of order Funnels need to be flexible — different steps, different timeframes Calculation needs to be fast, even with thousands of events The integration overhead for the developer must be minimal My goal: a developer should be able to start tracking in under 5 minutes with a single HTTP POST. Architecture Overview Browser/App → REST API → Event Storage → Queue → Funnel Engine → Dashboard The stack: Backend: Laravel 12 with a modular architecture (nwidart/