About Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is an open source project dedicated to making web analytics more privacy-friendly. Our mission is to reduce corporate surveillance by providing an alternative web analytics tool which doesn’t come from the AdTech world.

Plausible is trusted by thousands of paying subscribers. We are completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped team of 10 core members. The legal entity is incorporated in Estonia, while our team works remotely and flexibly.

Independent, self-funded and sustainable by the subscription fees our users pay us

Plausible Analytics development started in December 2018, public beta was launched in January 2019 and the subscriptions in May 2019. You can read more about our progress over years here.

We run a sustainable project funded solely by the fees that our subscribers pay us. Revenue from subscriptions is used to pay our rent, further develop Plausible and allow us to commit to Plausible and open source full time.

We are not interested in raising funds or taking investment. Not from individuals, not from institutions and not from venture capitalists. Our business model has nothing to do with collecting and analyzing huge amounts of personal information from web users and using these behavioral insights to sell advertisements.

We don’t make money by selling or sharing your data, or abusing your visitor’s privacy. When using Plausible Analytics, you 100% own and control all of your website data. This data is not being shared with or sold to any third-parties.

Since we don’t make money from advertising, we need to charge a fee to keep the project going. This is why Plausible Analytics is not free as in beer. We choose the subscription business model rather than the business model of surveillance capitalism.

Is it possible to have privacy-friendly web analytics?

We founded Plausible Analytics to create a privacy-friendly alternative to very popular and widely used surveillance capitalism web analytics tools that are installed and tracking user behavior on the majority of websites online.

Some people don’t use analytics at all and that’s fantastic. We don’t push our solution on people who don’t want to track anything about their website visitors. We also encourage server log analysis as a privacy-friendly solution. Unfortunately, server logs have a big bot detection problem.

From speaking to many website and business owners, it is evident that going without any analytics at all or using server logs is not a viable alternative for the majority of them. Most of them want some useful insights into what their efforts result in. If privacy-activists insist they switch to server logs or they remove analytics completely, they will just keep using privacy-intrusive options that they are used to.

Our goal is to reduce the number of websites and businesses online that run proprietary, user-hostile and privacy-invasive web analytics products. We do that by providing them with a competitive, useful and actionable analytics product that at the same time respects the privacy of their website visitors.

What makes Plausible Analytics a more privacy-friendly alternative to the average web analytics tool?

• We are open and transparent so anyone can view, review and inspect the code we’re running to verify whether our actions match with our words

• We minimize any data collection in general and whatever we do track is kept fully secured, encrypted and hosted on a server in the European Union to ensure it is being covered by the strict laws on data privacy

• We do not track and collect any personal data or personally identifiable information. Comparing Plausible Analytics to server logs, in server logs you can see all the IP addresses of your visitors and details on when they visited your site while there is no way to get any kind of personal data from Plausible Analytics

• We do not track individual people. All the data is in aggregate only

• We do not track people across their devices. All the data is isolated to a single device only. There is no way to know whether the same person visits a site from more than one device

• We do not track people across websites and apps that they visit. All the data is isolated to a single website only. There is no way to know what other websites someone visits

• We do not use cookies and we do not generate any persistent identifiers. We generate a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitors on a website and we reset this string once per day. All the data is isolated to a single day only. There is no way to know whether a person comes back to a site on another day

• We do not share or send the data to any advertising companies or any other third-parties in general. The data is not monetized, mined and harvested for personal and behavioral trends. The website owner completely owns and controls the data from their website

• We have an in-built feature that we recommend all website owners use to open up their stats to the public and share it on their site to be fully transparent so their visitors and anyone else can view the data that they have access to

See our data policy for the full list of data we do collect to display your web stats and which metrics we use the data for. We also have a deeper look into how Plausible Analytics is built to be a privacy-friendly web analytics tool that’s compliant with the different privacy regulations.

How do you prevent Plausible Analytics from going from “Don’t be evil” to “Be evil”?

Plausible Analytics is an open source project. Our core is free and open source under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) or any later version.

Good intentions are not always enough and being open source is the best way to prevent us from going from “Don’t be evil” to “Be evil”. Our core is not proprietary and our users are not locked down so we have to be the best business running this codebase. The threat of forking is a real threat and if we make some evil choices or sell out to some evil corp, you can take the code and have your own Plausible. This keeps us honest.

Imagine if you had the same choice with your favorite proprietary and closed source app so if they decided to change the strategy, to make user-hostile decisions or to sell out to a corporation with different beliefs, the community could simply take over and keep alive the product that they love while ignoring the new development. You can do that with Plausible.

Growing thanks to word of mouth

Plausible Analytics is made with care, designed with love and built to last. We avoid most traditional marketing practices and instead focus on creating a great product experience with accurate stats, powerful insights and an easy-to-use dashboard.

Our primary obligation is to Plausible subscribers, not investors, advertisers or any other third parties. We listen to feedback and try to make good decisions while staying true to our mission and meeting rigorous standards for stability, security and privacy.

A significant portion of our growth comes from website and business owners who love using Plausible and share their experiences with the world. We are grateful to everyone who helps spread the word about Plausible. Without people sharing their experiences it would be difficult for us to do what we do. Thank you!