20,000+ teams now pay for Plausible! 🎉
That's 20,000 teams who looked at the free option and decided their visitors' privacy mattered more.
We're grateful to everyone who's chosen Plausible. Thank you. 🙏
Remote
Plausible Analytics
@plausible@fosstodon.org
mastodon 4.7.3Easy to use, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. No cookies and no need for GDPR consent. Made and hosted in the EU 🇪🇺. 100% self-funded and independent.
3126 Followers
13 Following
50 Posts
Joined July 14, 2020
In a time where SaaS customers are automatically migrated to new plans costing up to 20x more, we still honor our grandfathered plans.
Seven years in, some subscribers are still paying the price they signed up for years ago. We manually maintain those plans for them even as our pricing evolves.
It’s the era of acquisitions and fancy exits. We don’t plan on having one.
There are no investors pushing us toward one either. Just you, us, and a product we believe in.
Most traffic visiting your website is not human.
If your analytics counts everything, you don’t know what’s real.
Clean data matters more than big data.
Fourth record-breaking month in a row.
June delivered our highest new MRR and most paying subscribers ever.
Zero spent on ads.
Zero paid to affiliates.
Zero shortcuts taken.
This is what happens when you just keep building.
3 weeks ago, we shared how much time adding a 1000 subscribers from the previous milestone took us:
Going from 15K → 16K subscribers took us 8 months
16K → 17K: 5 months
17K → 18K: 1 month
Today we've crossed 19,000 paying subscribers.
The next 1,000 is already here.
Seven years into this, we're growing at an accelerating speed.
No VC money. No sales calls. No surveillance scripts.
Building one subscriber at a time.
Many of our best decisions came from rejecting perfectly reasonable requests.
Not because they were bad ideas.
Because they pulled us away from our core promise:
• Simplicity over completeness
• Opinionated over configurable
• Privacy over data collection
• Focus over feature breadth
• Common use cases over edge cases
That’s how we avoid becoming another Google Analytics.
Everyone tells you to hire fast. It "feels" like growth.
We’re 10 people, seven years in.
No hiring sprees.
No layoffs.
No cycles of expansion and contraction.
Just careful additions when the work demanded it.
Most of the team that joined early is still here. A couple moved on when their paths changed.
Continuity doesn’t feel dramatic while it’s happening, only later do you realize how much it shaped the company.
Most SaaS companies hide their limitations. We just made a page listing ours.
It's not anti-marketing, it's clarity.
Plausible is built for a specific customer and there are some things that we'd never do:
- Individual user tracking
- Session recordings
- Retargeting
etc.
We'd rather lose a sale than gain a frustrated customer.
Startup culture celebrates hustle.
• 16-hour shifts
• Late nights
• “Always grinding”
What it ignores:
• Decision fatigue
• Chronic stress
• Losing interest in something you once loved
So instead of pushing harder, we cut the things that don't matter. Both in the product and in our working culture.
We don't believe in outworking others. But building things that solve real problems.
Result: More clarity. Better decisions. Better sleep.
Most "EU-hosted" tools aren't EU companies.
A tool can store data in Frankfurt while being run by a US company, using US infrastructure, with EU hosting as an optional add-on.
"Where is the data hosted?" is just one question.
Also ask:
• Who owns the company?
• Who owns the infrastructure?
• Which subprocessors access visitor data?
• Is EU handling the default?
EU hosting = data location compliance.
EU ownership = jurisdiction and control.
Both matter.
Simplicity is not the absence of capability.
It’s the absence of noise.
Removing friction is harder than adding features.
That’s the work we care about.
Sentry ditched Google Analytics for Plausible in 2024. Removed all ad cookies.
Two years later: Still cookie-free. Still no GA. No going back.
A bunch of referral sources that used to show up as plain text now have proper icons.
Small change, but it makes your traffic sources list much easier to scan. ✨
We just shipped one of the most requested improvements:
Subdomain visibility in the Pages report.
If you're tracking blog.yoursite, app.yoursite, etc., you can now break them down by URL and see exactly where visitors are landing.
One script. One dashboard. Unified sessions across main domain and subdomains.
✓ Already working on your existing data.
You can track ad performance without tracking people.
Click a Google or Microsoft ad and the landing URL includes:
?gclid=...
?msclkid=...
Those are unique click identifiers. Useful for attribution, but they create GDPR concerns when collected without consent.
Plausible strips the unique ID automatically and keeps what you need: the traffic source.
You can still view and filter clicks from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.
✅ No personal identifier stored ✅ Campaign insights preserved
Wrapping up April with numbers we've never seen before!
First time crossing 4k trial signups and 1k new paid subscribers in a single month. 🎉
Still no growth hacks, just organic growth doing its magic. Thanks for showing us love. 🫶
We don't ask for previous pay slips when people join Plausible.
We know our budgets. We know their capabilities. We know what feels fair.
That should be enough.
Salary history often just carries existing pay gaps forward. We'd rather focus on paying people properly from the start.
17,000+ teams are now paying for Plausible Analytics!
That's thousands of people free of surveillance scripts, cookie banners and complex dashboards.
Cherry on top is that 17K subscribers gives us something rare:
• We can stay independent
• We can keep building privacy-first analytics
• We can say no to things that don’t align
Thank you all for the support!
User Journeys is finally taking shape 😍👇
This 6-year signup graph felt worth sharing.
From near zero to 109k unique signups.
Without viral moments, growth hacks or ads. Trust the process.
Thanks for all the positive feedback on the new AI Assistants channel! We also took the opportunity to improve traffic source classification across Plausible.
Many referral URLs that previously appeared as "Referral" traffic are now grouped under their appropriate channels. For e.g.,
- Kagi is now classified as Organic Search
- Several Mastodon instances, Bluesky domains and Threads referrals are now classified as Organic Social.
We hope this helps make Plausible a bit more useful!
Some companies buy attention on “best Google Analytics alternative” pages.
Plausible has never spent a cent on ads, affiliates or paid endorsements.
When people recommend us, it is because they chose to. That trust is worth more than any placement we could buy.
We just saw a day with 200+ signups for the first time ever in the history of Plausible!
Biggest contributors: Google, ChatGPT, and word of mouth as usual!
Thanks for giving privacy-friendly analytics a try. 🫶
AI assistants traffic just got their own channel in Plausible!
Includes ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Phind, and Grok (previously under organic search).
Cherry on top: Works retroactively with your historical data. Enjoy!
🆕 Transferring sites in Plausible just got easier.
All transfer options are now in one place. Move your site to:
→ another team
→ your personal sites
→ another Plausible account
No more hunting around. Quick, straightforward, done.
Plausible User Journeys lets you analyze entire sections of your website, not just individual URLs.
Looking at blog? Choose "📁/blog" to see visitor paths across all blog posts combined, not each post separately.
Or choose a specific blog post directly.
Your pick.
Same for /docs, /products, or any other section.
You get a clearer view of how different parts of your site contribute to conversions.
Google Gemini traffic ≠ Google Search traffic.
Mixing them inflates your organic numbers and hides how AI is actually finding you.
In Plausible, they're tracked separately:
• Gemini → AI Assistants
• Google Search → Organic Search
Your reports stay accurate. No guessing.
You trust the numbers you see on your GA dashboard.
But a huge chunk of your traffic never made it there because people declined the consent banner.
Exactly how much? The real numbers will blow your mind.
For a site with:
- 100K monthly reported visitors by GA, and
- consent acceptance rate of 55% (the global average)
You're losing ~981,816 visitors from your analytics every year!
Calculate the real cost for your site → https://plausible.io/cookie-banner-traffic-loss-calculator
1,000 visitors hit your pricing page.
200 signed up.
Funnels tell you 800 dropped off.
But User Journeys shows you where those 800 went instead.
Pick a starting point that you're most curious about, and start exploring the journeys your visitors take from there.
Live now in the Explore tab 💜→
Plausible has supported keyboard shortcuts for years.
The custom date range calendar was one of the few places where the experience wasn't fully keyboard-first.
That's fixed now.
Now you can create UTM links directly in Plausible 😄
Location reports just got better.
Now you can see bounce rate and visit duration for each country, region, and city.
Not just where your traffic comes from, but how engaged those visitors actually are.
ChatGPT has overtaken Reddit and X as a traffic source for PR newsrooms, and is now the #6 referrer!
While Google still dominates by a huge margin.
The web’s distribution layer is changing fast.
👉 Data from Prezly, after analyzing thousands of sites using Plausible.
We added a free ad cost calculator to help you measure what matters. It also serves as a useful extension to those tracking ad campaigns in Plausible.
Input your numbers:
→ Ad spend
→ Clicks
→ Impressions
→ Conversions
Get instant metrics:
→ CPC (cost per click)
→ CPM (cost per mille)
→ CPA (cost per acquisition)
→ CTR
→ Conversion rate
Most form analytics tell you *that* someone converted. They don't tell you *where*.
Now you can see exactly which page your form got submitted on. Just click on your "Form: Submission" goal to reveal details.
- It's codeless.
- It's simple.
- It's insightful.
- Works with almost any form integration.
Try turning on form submissions tracking from your site settings, if not already!
Most 'privacy-first' tools still track you.
We make sure your data stays on EU servers.
We proxy services like Gravatar so no personal data leaks.
We don't even track email opens or clicks.
That's what privacy-first actually means.
One of the questions we ask before building anything:
"Does this help people understand their website?"
If the answer is instead:
• watch people
• profile people
• retarget people
• collect invasive data
...it's probably not something we'll build.
Analytics should help you understand your site.
Not profile visitors.
Your website traffic is your asset.
It shouldn’t be repurposed, resold or mined.
Analytics should serve you.
Why does Facebook show up 12 times in your campaign report when you only ran 3 ads?
Inconsistent UTM parameters. One person writes "Facebook" with a capital F. Another uses "facebook" lowercase. A third accidentally adds a space. Your analytics splits them into separate entries, making trends impossible to spot.
We built a UTM checker to fix this. Drop your link in, get instant feedback on formatting issues, and copy a cleaned-up version.
Comparing stats for only equal time ranges?
"7 days vs 7 days," "30 vs 30."
In Plausible, you can also compare unequal time ranges, like:
• 3-day weekend sale performance vs that full week
• A launch week traffic spike vs that full month
• Summer break dip vs last quarter
Better comparisons → better insights.
Today, we came one major step closer to building "user journeys" (our most requested feature).
We're as eager to ship this as you are to use it.
Stripe shows up as your #1 referral source? 🚩
That's not a win. That's broken attribution.
You're giving credit to a checkout redirect, not the channel that actually brought the customer.
Plausible fixes this by tracking the original source.
When someone converts, you see what really drove the sale:
→ Organic search
→ Your newsletter
→ A referral link
❌ Not the payment processor.
So you know exactly where your revenue is coming from.
A surprising thing about website analytics:
Most teams look at fewer than 5 metrics regularly.
Yet analytics tools track hundreds.
More data doesn’t create better decisions.
Clarity does.
Google Analytics serves Google first. You get what's left over.
That's why the interface changes in ways that don't help you. Why simple features take years (if they arrive at all). Why privacy compliance falls on your shoulders.
Their strategic goal is feeding the ad machine and collecting data.
Your goal is understanding your visitors.
Those don't align.
Free tools cost you in other ways.
Replying to
One July number we left out: 4,248 trial signups, our third-best month ever.
That’s the final point on the chart.
The chart isn't a mockup. It's our real, public dashboard. You can follow the August numbers live here: https://plausible.io/plausible.io
We just added strict order funnels to Plausible.
You can now require visitors to go from one step to the next with no other actions in between.
Perfect for measuring tightly defined conversion paths without noise.
Learn more: https://plausible.io/docs/funnel-analysis
Replying to
Want the old behaviour? Use “vs custom period” to select and compare against a full day.
Ideal for seeing if today's graph is trending in a similar way, spotting early patterns and performance changes throughout the day.
If your “conversion rate calculator” is:
→ a Google Sheet
→ with 7 tabs
→ and 3 broken formulas
we made something for you.
3 dead-simple calculators.
No setup.
No clutter.
Just answers: https://plausible.io/conversion-rate-calculator
