You ship something on a Saturday, post it on X and Reddit, and on Monday you want to know what happened. That means one script tag and a dashboard you can read in a minute, on a bill the side project can carry. Once people pay you, you'll also want to know which of those posts brought the buyers, and whether they were worth the evening you spent writing them.
This list covers eight tools that solo makers reach for, and one of them is ours. We make Spreelytics, so read our entry with that in mind. For each of the others we say where it beats us, and the features and prices come from each vendor's own pages, checked in October and November 2026. Both change, so look again before you pay.
The short answer
For traffic stats with the strongest privacy story and the plainest dashboard, pick Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics. To see which channel brings paying customers, Spreelytics does it free up to 1 million events a month across unlimited projects, and DataFast is a paid tool built for indie makers around the same question. On a budget of zero, use Umami's free cloud or GoatCounter, or host either one yourself.
At a glance
| Tool | Best for | Free plan | Revenue by channel | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreelytics | Several products, and which posts bring buyers | 1M events a month, unlimited projects | Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy | No |
| Plausible | A one-page cookieless dashboard | 30-day trial | Revenue goals on Business, no model | Yes |
| Fathom | A dashboard nobody has to learn | 7-day trial | No | No |
| Simple Analytics | Storing nothing personal | Free, 30 days of history | No | No |
| DataFast | Revenue attribution made for founders | 14-day trial | Same four, plus Shopify and WooCommerce | No |
| Umami | Self-hosting in an afternoon | 100k events, 1 site | First or last click | Yes |
| GoatCounter | Free visit counts on a personal site | Free for reasonable use | No | Yes |
| PostHog | Replay, flags and experiments in one | 1M events, 1 project | In beta, first or last touch | Yes |
1. Spreelytics
One script tag collects traffic, sources, pages, referrers and all five UTM fields, and the same events feed funnels, retention, journeys and a timeline for each person. Nothing is sampled. New projects are cookieless. You can switch on one first-party cookie per project to see who comes back.
If you run three products at once, projects are unlimited on the free plan, so every launch gets its own. Payments from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy are credited to the channel that brought the buyer, last-touch or linear, over a window you set between 1 and 90 days. Your Reddit thread and your launch-day tweet then sit side by side in dollars. The revenue page adds MRR and ARR. How to see which channel earned each Stripe payment walks through the setup, and our MCP server lets Claude Code or Cursor read the numbers for you.
Where others win: Plausible, Fathom and Simple Analytics have plainer dashboards and a cookieless mode with no switch to get wrong. DataFast splits churn, upgrades and downgrades by channel and puts Meta ad spend next to revenue. We have no heatmaps and no self-hosting, and the code is closed. Session replay needs the Growth plan.
Pricing: free up to 1 million events a month, forever, with 13 months of data and every feature except session replay and the in-app AI assistant. Growth adds both, from $59 a month for 1 million events. The full ladder is on the pricing page.
2. Plausible
A lightweight, open-source tool that never sets a cookie and keeps data in the EU. The dashboard is one page. The script is tiny, and the tracker has one mode that stores nothing in the browser, so there's no setting anyone can flip by mistake.
It never recognises a returning visitor, which rules out retention and a single person's history. Funnels, user journeys and revenue goals sit on the Business plan, where revenue goes to the source of the visit that paid with no model to pick.
Pricing: a 30-day trial, then from $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews. A million pageviews costs $69 on Starter and $139 on Business. See Spreelytics vs Plausible.
Choose it if you want honest traffic numbers on one page, from open-source code hosted in the EU.
3. Fathom
Cookieless and privacy-first, with a feature set it keeps small on purpose. You get one dashboard and nothing to configure. Its EU isolation option strips visitor IPs inside the EU before the anonymised data is stored on US servers.
Every plan carries every feature and includes 50 sites, which suits a maker with a folder full of side projects. Fathom has no funnels, retention or revenue reports.
Pricing: a 7-day trial, then from $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews. A million costs $60. See Spreelytics vs Fathom.
Choose it if you want a dashboard you'll never need to learn.
4. Simple Analytics
A privacy-first service, owned in the EU, with its servers in the Netherlands, that sets no cookie and never stores an IP address, not even a hashed one. Its free plan has no pageview cap under fair use, keeps 30 days of history and shows their badge on your site.
By its own account, it isn't a fit for journeys or cohorts, because it never links one visit to the next. There are multi-step goals but no revenue reports.
Pricing: free, with 30 days of history. Paid plans cost $60 a month at a million datapoints, which count pageviews and events together. See Spreelytics vs Simple Analytics.
Choose it if you only ever look at the last month and want nothing personal stored.
5. DataFast
Revenue-first web analytics for founders and small teams. Of everything here it is the closest to ours, and it was made with indie makers in mind. It connects Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Paddle, and also Shopify and WooCommerce with no script to paste. MRR, churn, upgrades and downgrades are split by channel. It shows who mentions you on X and Reddit and which posts led to sales, puts Meta ad spend beside revenue, and has iOS and Android apps.
There is no free plan, only a trial. Retention is new against returning visitors, and journeys are shown one visitor at a time. Its docs don't name an attribution model.
Pricing: a 14-day trial with no card, then $9 a month for 10,000 events on one website, or $19 a month for 30 websites. Both include API, CLI and MCP access. See Spreelytics vs DataFast.
Choose it if you want churn and ad spend split by channel and don't mind paying from day one.
6. Umami
Open source under the MIT licence and easy to run yourself: one container and a database. Since version 3 it has journeys, retention, segments, visitor profiles, revenue with first or last-click attribution, and session replay, which costs nothing when you host it yourself.
The free cloud plan is one website, with no API or MCP access. Umami also counts every stored event property as an event, so an event with three properties uses four.
Pricing: free to self-host. The cloud's Hobby plan is free for 100,000 events on one site, and Pro costs $20 a month for a million events. See Spreelytics vs Umami.
Choose it if you're happy to run a small server, or a single site fits in the free cloud.
7. GoatCounter
Open source, with a hosted service that's free for personal sites and small businesses under reasonable use. Self-hosted, it's one program and a SQLite file. It can count with a tracking pixel, so it works with JavaScript turned off. By default it keeps only totals.
It forgets a visitor after eight hours, by design. Funnels, journeys and revenue are out of scope, and of the UTM fields it reads only the campaign and source.
Pricing: free for reasonable use, and free to self-host. See Spreelytics vs GoatCounter.
Choose it if you want visit counts on a blog or a tiny project and to pay nothing at all.
8. PostHog
An open-source platform that started with product analytics and grew into session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys and a data warehouse. One SDK covers all of it. You can use the cloud or host it yourself, and nothing is sampled.
If you only want to glance at Monday's traffic, that's a lot to learn. Web analytics is a newer part of it, and revenue attribution is still in beta, with first or last touch.
Pricing: the free plan takes 1 million events a month in one project, with a year of data. Past that, pay-as-you-go keeps the free million and charges per event. See PostHog pricing.
Choose it if your product is an app and you'll use replay and flags every week.
How to choose
- You want traffic numbers and the strongest privacy story: Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics.
- You run several products and want to know which posts bring buyers: Spreelytics, free up to 1 million events across unlimited projects. Or DataFast, if churn by channel, X mentions and ad spend are worth a monthly fee to you.
- Your budget is zero and you can run a server: Umami or GoatCounter, self-hosted.
- You're building an app and ship behind flags: PostHog.
Google Analytics 4 is free too, at any volume. It links deeply into Google Ads. Funnels, paths and cohorts are built by hand in its Explore section, though, and big explorations come back sampled. If you're weighing one of the lighter tools against us on price, the numbers are in web analytics pricing compared.