Say, I'm developing a Windows (if OS is important) application that will be available to download for free and I would like then to collect some usage statistics. In the easiest case - count of application launches. It looks superfluous to maintain a server (e.g. VDS) just for this.
I've been thinking to use Google Analytics for this (manually send requests to GA server). This will probably work, but it is not GA designed for - the idea looks like a hack.
What are the options here?