Plausible Analytics

European companies prefer Plausible. You can host your website in Europe, choose European infrastructure and take GDPR seriously. Then load Google Analytics on every page and send your visitors’ data to Google. For companies trying to keep more of their stack and data in Europe, that increasingly doesn’t make much sense. One of our subscribers put it simply: “Plausible being built in the EU matters to us too... it would be odd to route our own visitors through Google.” Plausible is built and operated in the EU. Visitor data stays in the EU. Sometimes the choice is that simple.

Home Assistant, one of the most popular open-source projects, is using Plausible web analytics across all its websites. 😍

You don't need a hidden business model if you can keep a simple, clear relationship with your customers. You pay for a product. We build the product for you. We don’t need to monetize the personal data of the people visiting your website, and make the economics work. Plausible is open source, so you don’t have to trust our word either. You can verify it for yourself. Sometimes paying for software isn’t the compromise. It’s what makes the incentives clear. A happy Plausible subscriber:

Patience + trust in the process play a role here too. It took us 324 days to reach $400 MRR. Not $400k. $400. Another 9 months: $10k MRR. And 3 years after launching: $1M ARR. Today, more than 20k teams pay for Plausible. Still open-source. Still fully user-supported. If you are in year one and progress feels painfully slow, remember: slow is not the same as stuck.

Customers make an open-source business financially stable, not donations. We tried to fund Plausible through donations. In 6 months, we got 6 donations. $5 each. $30 total. In the same 6 months, paid subscriptions grew from $400 to $8,500 MRR. People didn't pay because they believed in the project. They paid because it solved their problem. Open source needs a business model, not a tip jar.

A VC firm accidentally became our press team. We’ve received hundreds of emails from investors over the years. We’ve said no every time. Being 100% subscriber-funded means we answer to the people paying for Plausible. No investor agenda to balance against theirs. The funny part? The TechCrunch story about us came from a ranking of the fastest-growing open-source startups created by a VC firm. We topped the list.

Two analytics companies. Two data policies. Google: “...measure the effectiveness of advertising... and personalize content and ads...” Plausible: “Your data is not used for advertising, profiling or monetization.” Privacy isn’t a setting. It starts with the business model.

Schrems I ended Safe Harbour in 2015. Schrems II ended Privacy Shield in 2020. noyb is preparing what could become Schrems III against the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and asked the European Commission to withdraw it. Google Analytics uses it for EU-US transfers. Plausible keeps visitor data in the EU on EU-owned infrastructure.

While indie hacker Twitter debated whether SaaS is dying, our July: • $22.2k in new MRR, our best month ever • MRR up 28.5% year over year • 20,183 paying subscribers The argument is that AI has made every product easy to clone. Our code has been open source and free to clone since 2019. Turns out the code was never the moat.

"The cost of analytics is not the cost of your analytics subscription: it's the engineering time and cognitive overhead you put on yourself." People often compare analytics tools by monthly price. But that's rarely the expensive part. There is also an underrated cost: engineering time. Maintenance. Complexity. Trying to remember how your setup works six months later. Every hour spent maintaining your analytics is an hour not spent building your product.