Plausible Analytics Has a Free Self-Hosted Option — Privacy-First Web Analytics Without Google

A marketing manager asked me to add Google Analytics to their site. I asked: "Do you need to know which city your users are in, or just which pages they visit?" She wanted page views, top referrers, and device breakdown. That's it. I set up Plausible instead. The dashboard loaded in 200ms (not 3 seconds). No cookie banner needed. GDPR compliant by default. What You Get Free (Self-Hosted) Plausible is open-source. Self-host for free, or use their cloud at $9/month: No cookies — GDPR/CCPA compliant without consent banners 1KB script — vs 45KB for Google Analytics (45x lighter) Real-time dashboard — page views, referrers, devices, countries Goal tracking — custom events and conversions UTM parameters — campaign tracking API access — query your analytics programmatically Revenue tracking — assign monetary values to goals Email reports — weekly/monthly summaries Shared links — public dashboards without login Data export — your data is yours Quick Start (Self-Hosted with Docker) git clone ht