Analytics and monitoring decision
Simple Analytics
A small team or single competent developer can reproduce the core cookieless collection, dashboard, and export features; full enterprise polish and trust are harder to replicate, but prior open-source projects demonstrate the core is achievable.
Visit website↗$20/mo
$240/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Simple Analytics alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect cookieless pageviews from a JS snippet → store aggregated events → query and display simple dashboard charts → export raw data via an API/CSV.
What it still won’t have
- EU-hosted, managed production infrastructure and operational SLAs
- SOC 2 level security/compliance and vendor procurement support
- Polished UI/UX and native apps (iOS/macOS, browser extensions)
- Brand recognition and enterprise trust (customers, demos, support)
- Large-scale reliability, bot-filtering, and anti-abuse systems
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Loved by 31,300+ users
- Brand trust
Trusted by teams that need a clearer picture
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a privacy-first, cookieless web analytics service using: JS frontend snippet (vanilla JS) + Node.js (Express) ingestion API + Postgres (or ClickHouse) for raw events + Redis for rate-limiting + Next.js dashboard. Scope: implement a no-cookie JS tracker that posts pageviews/events (page URL, referrer, UTM, device, country derived server-side), server endpoints that validate and store events, aggregation queries for hourly/daily pageviews, simple funnel metric, filtering by country/referrer/UTM, CSV/JSON export API with API-key auth, and a minimal dashboard showing time-series charts and table of top referrers. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, SOC2 compliance, white-labeling, native mobile apps, advanced bot detection. Include input validation, error handling, request rate-limits, basic tests for ingestion and aggregation, and docker-compose deployment; provide a README with setup and an example snippet to paste into a website.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productSimple Analytics - product
- official pricingSimple Analytics - pricing
- official docsSimple Analytics - features
- open sourcerybbit-io/rybbit
- open sourcemilesmcc/shynet
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
