GoatCounter

GoatCounter is a privacy-first web analytics counter that records pageviews, referrers, browsers, screen sizes and countries without cookies or unique visitor IDs, so it usually needs no consent banner. Bloggers, indie developers and small businesses use it as a lighter alternative to Google Analytics. The hosted service is free, funded by donations, and the code is open source for self-hosting.

What the free plan gives you

The hosted version at goatcounter.com is offered for free for reasonable public usage. In the vendor's words, running your personal website or small-to-medium business on it is fine, but sending millions of pageviews a day is not. The tracking script adds about 3.5 KB to a page, and you can also count via a tracking pixel, HTTP middleware or by parsing existing server logs, which means it works on sites where JavaScript is off. You own your data and can export everything and cancel at any time. Donations are accepted through GitHub Sponsors to cover server costs, but nothing is gated behind them.

Where the free plan stops

There is no paid plan to upgrade to, so the ceiling is the fair-use expectation rather than a number. High-traffic sites are asked to self-host, which the vendor supports for any purpose. You also will not find features like funnels, session replay, heatmaps or event-level product analytics; GoatCounter is deliberately a counter, not a product analytics suite.

Who it suits

Personal sites, documentation, small shops and side projects that just want to know how many people visited and where they came from. Teams that need conversion funnels, user cohorts or A/B testing should look at Plausible, Umami or PostHog instead.