I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives.
Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section.
I do not see hosted analytics as real competition to GA since you have the same privacy problems.
Self-hosting should be the preferred option.
https://render.com/docs/deploy-fathom-analytics
Plausible should provide instructions to self-host for people who want to try it.
>self hosting is not supported
Ok, then how do you prove it's open source?
This product goes in a long and tedious rant, trying to justify why they are indeed open-source. (https://plausible.io/open-source-website-analytics)
If you need to do all these mental gymnastics to try to convince someone (or yourself) that this is a legit open-source software project, then you are probably not open source.
The only open-source thing about this is that the code is visible in a public repo. That's it. There's no invitation to contribute or requests to open PRs. There's no community of OS contributors, no open discussion about features, and no instructions on how to self-host (and according to their website, an explicit intention to never support or release a genuinely self-hosted distribution).
This is my personal opinion but just because your code is publicly available, that doesn't make it open source. It is at best transparent development tied to a permissive OS license.