Plausible Analytics
Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent.
Simple, cookie-free website analytics on one page: visitors, pages, sources, countries and goals. It is open source and can be self-hosted, so the paid product is the hosting and the upkeep rather than the software.
Build me first-party web analytics with no cookie and no identifier that survives the day. STACK - Node with Fastify, SQLite via better-sqlite3 - Server-rendered dashboard, no charting library COLLECTION - One endpoint accepting page path, referrer, screen width and a site token - Appended with a UTC timestamp; nothing is ever updated THE VISITOR HASH - HMAC(ip + user-agent + site + UTC date, secret) - The date is an input, so yesterday's hash cannot be linked to today's - Only the hash is stored; the address and the user agent are discarded immediately BOTS - A user-agent blocklist applied at ingest, with dropped hits counted separately so the numbers stay honest DASHBOARD - Visitors, pageviews and bounce rate over a selectable range - Top pages, referrers grouped by host, and a daily bar chart drawn as inline SVG GOALS - Defined as a path pattern or a custom event, with conversion counts per source THE SCRIPT - Under 1KB, plus a server-side variant that records the view with no JavaScript at all RETENTION - A job that deletes nothing but aggregates old raw rows into daily counts past the window Include a README on the salt, the retention policy and the questions this design makes unanswerable.
What you lose
- Hosting the collector on infrastructure separate from the site it measures
- A script kept small and kept working as browsers change how they treat third-party requests
- Bot filtering and referrer spam handling maintained by someone who watches it full time
- Funnels, goals and revenue attribution already built
- The convenience of not operating a database that grows with every visit
If you would rather not build
- Matomo — the heavyweight self-hosted option
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Plausible
$0Plausible's own source — the same product, running on your machine.
plausible/analyticsfree · open source
Umami
$0Web analytics with no cookies and no personal data, self-hosted or on their cloud.
umami-software/umamifree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
80/100
Verdict yes at 80: counting page views is a solved problem and Plausible is itself open source and self-hostable, which is the honest first move. Score is not higher because you take on a database that grows forever and the bot filtering nobody thinks about until the numbers look wrong.
History
tracked since 6 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Questions about Plausible Analytics
answered from the record above
Is Plausible Analytics free?
No — the plan we track is $9 a month. Starter at the 10k monthly pageviews tier, $9/mo on either billing cycle. The price scales with pageviews.
Can you replace Plausible Analytics by building your own?
YES. Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent. Replacement score 80 out of 100, build time one session. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does Plausible Analytics cost?
$9 a month on Starter — $108 a year. Recorded 6 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing Plausible Analytics?
Hosting the collector on infrastructure separate from the site it measures; A script kept small and kept working as browsers change how they treat third-party requests; Bot filtering and referrer spam handling maintained by someone who watches it full time; Funnels, goals and revenue attribution already built; The convenience of not operating a database that grows with every visit. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Plausible Analytics?
Yes: Plausible, Umami. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
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