The Lens

Plausible gives you a clean, lightweight analytics dashboard with no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no personal data collection. The tracking script is under 1KB. Your visitors don't get a cookie banner. AGPL v3, Elixir/Phoenix. The dashboard is refreshingly simple: page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, referral sources, top pages, countries, devices. No 47-tab interface like GA4. You see what matters in one screen.

Self-hosting is free. Docker Compose setup with ClickHouse for storage. The AGPL license means modifications must be open-sourced. Plausible Cloud starts at $9/mo for up to 10K monthly page views. Scales to $19/mo (100K), $29/mo (200K), and up. Annual billing gives ~33% discount.

Solo: self-host for free if you're comfortable with Docker and ClickHouse. Cloud at $9/mo is worth it to skip the ops. Small teams: $9-19/mo is cheap for privacy-compliant analytics. Medium to large: self-host to avoid per-pageview pricing at scale.

The catch: Plausible is intentionally limited. No user-level tracking, no funnels (basic goal tracking exists), no cohort analysis. If you need to answer "what did user X do before they churned," you need a different tool. And self-hosting ClickHouse isn't trivial: it's resource-hungry and needs monitoring.