markosaric

Thanks for the feedback! Could you please share what you mean by bait and switch?

We're fully open source, we have a completely free as in beer self-hosted solution and we've only done two price changes since we announced the original prices in May 2019 (and none of these have affected any existing subscribers as they're kept on prices they signed up with).

Price reviews are really necessary for us to do as we're self funded and we've grown our product, our infrastructure and our team a lot since the original prices so providing our service at May 2019 prices would not be sustainable today.

Thanks! All existing subscribers are grandfathered to the price they signed up with. And we do have a complete free as in beer self-hosted solution.

Thanks for your feedback! We've only had 3 different prices since May 2019 when we launched and you can see them on GitHub as the code goes there:

2019: $6/month for up to 10k pageviews/month with a 33% discount on annual billing

2021: $6/month for up to 10k pageviews/month with a 2 months for free discount on annual billing

2022: $9/month for up to 10k pageviews/month with a 2 months for free discount on annual billing

Any price change doesn't affect active subscribers. They are grandfathered to the plan they signed up with.

We're solely funded by the fees our subscribers pay us so we regularly review our prices as we improve the infrastructure, product and grow the team to keep it all priced sustainably.

(I'm the co-founder)

exactly! our first "viral" moment was on HN too and we only got a few direct signups that day but we would never have made it to this point without being on the top of HN that time

thanks for sharing! there's this saying in marketing that you should ignore anyone who's not much bigger than you so that's how we think about it. we focus on the tools with a large audience and ignore the rest as few people in our target audience would have heard about them. people tell us all the time how they didn't even know alternatives to GA existed before they found us and that tells a lot about the state of the market for millions of sites that use GA

good point, thanks! we had to shorten the top menu on mobile devices to fit all the important stuff so you only see "X filters" rather than the full filter as on the desktop

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

For our self-hosted version, you can install it with any cloud provider and in any country you wish. Even in the USA.

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

For our self-hosted version, you can install it with any cloud provider and in any country you wish. Even in the USA. That's the testing one we had on our site as we're testing the latest release of our self-hosted version on our own website. This has nothing to do with what our customers place on their sites.

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

For our self-hosted version, you can install it with any cloud provider and in any country you wish. Even in the USA.

All site data plausible.io stores on behalf of the customers is hosted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner, a European-owned company. Previously it was hosted by Digital Ocean in Germany but the move to Hetzner was made last year.

hi! we use Paddle for all the payments. i've sent an email to them now to see if they can tell us more. in majority of cases when transactions fails because the bank refuses the transaction they tell us to tell you to contact your bank or to try a different payment method. will get back to you with their response.

(the second Plausible cofounder)

Plausible has an events API that allows you to record pageviews and custom events without JS.

https://plausible.io/docs/events-api

(I'm the cofounder)

PostHog is more focused on product analytics rather than web analytics. It's a very different product to Plausible so we didn't really do a comparison with them. I would say they're more of an alternative to Mixpanel, Amplitude and those type of products rather than an alternative to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools.

(the second Plausible cofounder here)

the subreddit that drove the traffic to the post that was analyzed was /r/linux which should be more technical than the average subreddit out there

Depends really on the subreddit in question. The traffic to the blog post that was analyzed came from /r/linux which should be more tech savvy than the average web user and also more tech savvy than the average Reddit user (i would put /r/linux audience close to the Hacker News audience)

You mean like a page drilldown to see stats of the individual page? You can do that already. On our live demo, click on any page in the Top Pages report and the dashboard will be segmented to only show the traffic that visited that particular page.

What's wrong with AGPL that doesn't fit with our ideas?

We were on the MIT first and got into a situation where a large corporation wanted to take our code and resell it to tens of thousands of their customers and they made it clear they didn't want to contribute anything back to our project whatsoever.

We are a two person team putting our own time and savings into this and it could have instantly killed the project and the chance of becoming sustainable.

We changed the license and that was a simple way to stop them without changing our principles/ideas. Could have gone proprietary too at that stage but we didn't.

Everything is clearly explained here https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses

This is probably a better overview of what makes Plausible a privacy-focused tool: open source, can be self-hosted, no connection to adtech, minimal data collection, no cookies, no persistent identifiers, no personal data, no cross-site/device tracking etc

https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics

(I'm the co-founder)

thanks, glad to hear that! and hope you enjoy this feature!

yeah, i know what you mean. we'll see if we can somehow put some kind of a custom filter on the top of the dashboard to allow this usecase or perhaps add a search box to the top pages report. need to decide which way is best.

You can advertise using Adwords without having GA.

Yes. UTM tags (utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign) are fully supported. And you can filter the dashboard by any of them. And you can also see which of them refer traffic that ends up converting on any of your custom events/goals. You can try it out on our live demo: https://plausible.io/plausible.io

BrendanEich has some ideas on the "trust but verify" aspects of this. Plausible is 100% open source with no proprietary parts but we'd love to work with Brave (and Firefox/EasyList/uBlock Origin) to provide proof to get verified and unblocked by them. It would be a very effective way to get many more sites/businesses to remove GA

Agree. This started as a feature for our custom events/goals as people wanted to see conversions on dynamically generated checkout pages for ecommerce. But turns out it is useful for the use cases we're discussing here too so we plan to make it easier to discover/work with in the future.

We haven't set it for our docs on the live demo but we have set it up for /blog this exact use case. On our live demo scroll all the way down to Goal Conversions and click on "Visit /blog*". This gives you a filtered dashboard and on that filtered dashboard if you look at the Top Pages report you will see only the blog posts ranked by popularity and no other content that's outside of the /blog.

True. There's a lot of value in data server logs provide for many use cases. But for sites that use Google Analytics right now, in majority of cases they don't want that data and that data makes their dashboard so noisy that is no longer usable for the purposes they use GA for.

We're hoping to start a conversation with browsers such as Brave and Firefox and blocklist maintainers about this.

One way to incentivize even more sites to move from GA et al would be to create some kind of privacy criteria and whitelist those analytics that fulfill it (open source, minimal data, no personal data, no cookies/persistent identifiers, no cross-site/device tracking, no connection to adtech etc).

Site owners want analytics. We offer self-hosted service but most sites don't want to deal with managing analytics server as it is not an easy job. So by blocking every analytics tool (good or bad) the incentive for site owners is more on trying to avoid being blocked rather than on moving to something more privacy-friendly.

(I'm the Plausible co-founder)

Look into the Top Pages report on the linked page for the full list of all blog posts ranked by popularity. Click on the individual post to filter the dashboard by traffic to that post only.