Can you point me toward a more moral path that won't make it painful for SEO contractors to work with our startup?
If there's something better, or more informative than Google Analytics, I would obviously love to choose that!
Umami is a great self-hosted alternative, which you can load under a subdomain to avoid it being blocked by adblockers. Most of the SaaS products end up on uBlock or other adblocker lists, even when they respect privacy, so this has been my go to option.
UserTrack is another great option we use and it continues to add great features. It's more than worth the commercial license fee. I had a conversation with Cristian by email this weekend, for example, about adding a feature. By this morning he had put together an example in their docs on how to add the feature to your site.
There are several alternatives, you'll tend to find a lot of them advertised in the comments section here for any anti-Google Analytics post.