7 ms·

We bootstrapped our open source Google Analytics alternative to $500k ARR

206 points by tacon 5y ago

kinderjaje 5y ago
That is a nice journey guys. I just need x10 to reach your ARR. Currently doing AMA on IH about my bootstrapping project which made ~$50k revenue in less then year. https://www.indiehackers.com/post/bootstrapped-my-saas-to-50k-revenue-in-less-than-1-year-ama-840ba046d6 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/bootstrapped-my-saas-to-50...
tacon 5y ago
>If you hear about Plausible these days, it likely comes from one of our 4,802 paying customers. People who use and enjoy using Plausible help us spread the word to even more people. >We have a $0 paid advertising budget and we don’t have an affiliate program either. We pretty much ignore all the best marketing practices. This is very impressive, but I am not sure it generalizes to the average bootstrapped startup.
- paulgb 5y ago
  > I am not sure it generalizes I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be best practices if it did :) Still, it's nice to see that the model can work. As a happy customer, I'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable. When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone, incentives are very aligned for them to make the user experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewljohnson 5y ago
  That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C). Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on marketing until around a million annual revenue.
  - skadamat 5y ago
    +1 this, we bootstrapped at Dataquest and word of mouth played a big role
- tyingq 5y ago
  I don't know what else they did, but smartystreets.com did a great job with word of mouth. They would find forums with questions about address correction, and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their software. Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the post in a tactful way. I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.
- rp1 5y ago
  Marketing can help, but if people don’t love your product enough to tell others about it, then it’s going to be hard to get traction.
  - garbagecoder 5y ago
    Have you heard of Windows?
- mritchie712 5y ago
  > ignore all the best marketing practices Not sure how they're missing this, but they are not ignoring best practices. Content and SEO are fundamental marketing practices. This post and their entire blog is content and SEO. I guess they think it sounds cool to say "we don't care about marketing", but they are marketing the same way most bootstrappers people would tell you to.
andrewaylett 5y ago
One of those happy customers here -- I've always shied away from having any analytics, because my websites typically set no cookies and make no third-party requests. I'd prefer to be privacy-preserving than to see how little traffic my site gets. Now with Plausible I still have no cookies or third-party requests on my websites, but I get to see numbers too.
- XCSme 5y ago
  > No third-party requests on my websites I assume you are using the self-hosted version?
  - hootbootscoot 5y ago
    or proxying https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction
    - XCSme 5y ago
      But this still sends third-party requests, only that from your server, not the user. This is not a privacy-friendly technique, but the opposite of it.
      - andrewaylett 5y ago
        My take is that there are two factors at play here: * Third party requests from the browser are problematic in general for technical and privacy reasons: it's impossible for the browser to know whether the request is privacy-preserving or not. And they need to be enabled in tooling like CSP. It's much easier not to have any. * Third-party requests from my server don't give me any more information than I had before. I could store my logs and process them, or I can engage a third-party to aggregate my data for me. Plausible have no way to know that the requests I'm sending aren't entirely fictitious, and I can sleep slightly more soundly knowing that there's one less moving part that I need to maintain myself.
ryneandal 5y ago
This is awesome, but I had no idea what ARR was. Perhaps it's not ideal to have that acronym in the article's title.
- SCUSKU 5y ago
  Annual recurring revenue. It is a term frequently used by the indie hacker community in addition to MRR for monthly recurring revenue.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    It's also used by publicly traded software companies, not obscure and easily researchable term IMHO
  - ryneandal 5y ago
    I realized it's meaning once I read the article, but I don't think abbreviations should be used in article titles. Things like APA style guides state you shouldn't use abbreviations in titles, it should be accessible to non-experts.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  It's okay if you don't know and it's definitely okay to ask! They do tell you what it means in the second paragraph, though.
wcd-fyi 5y ago
I have been using plausible on my small personal site for about a year now. When I emailed their support to ask a question I got a helpful response from one of the founders within an hour. Good experience overall, and I appreciate their efforts to protect the privacy of visitors while still providing useful data for site owners.
- felixthehat 5y ago
  Same, had an issue last week (which turned out to be my fault) and I also had generous help from the founders, and they were cheerfully gracious when I apologised for wasting their time. I have recommended them to several clients.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tnolet 5y ago
I might be projecting, but this is another company doing well enabled by tech like Clickhouse. Tinybird is another. Timeseries and event metrics are just so snappy, and the API and product (Clickhouse this is) are enabling small teams to do crazy cool new stuff. (We're a Plausible and Clickhouse user at my company)
skadamat 5y ago
Besides resources like Indie Hackers, I highly recommend everyone here read Small Giants (https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...) which focuses on companies that have outsized impact feeling the pressure to grow. They profile companies that have 2 to 2,000 (or so?) people, but most focus on having an opinionated take (over growth for its own sake).
langitbiru 5y ago
The co-founders met each other on Twitter: https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing They are remote co-founders, if you will.
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  Woah, the real question is what on earth kind of "marketing" did Marko activate? Astronomical switch for them. Would love to read more about the tactics. This image blows my mind. Basically from 0 to 50,000 uniques in month?! Congrats https://microfounder.com/storage/posts/originals/sjswkbxufvlqrc2.png https://microfounder.com/storage/posts/originals/sjswkbxufvl...
  - langitbiru 5y ago
    He shared his marketing strategy here: https://www.starterstory.com/privacy-firendly-web-analytics-tool https://www.starterstory.com/privacy-firendly-web-analytics-... The answers are content marketing and spreading words in niche tech communities.
jensneuse 5y ago
I'm very happy for you! Still a happy paying customer. I've recently upped my plan. =) One thing, could you please stop the "too many redirects" problems? It's annoying.. -_-
u385639 5y ago
> We do miss out on getting featured in the tech media. TechCrunch published a story about our growth once (thanks to the VCs who were sharing a list of fastest growing open source startup) but otherwise, we get no coverage that VC-funded startups get. This isn't because you're bootstrapped, it's likely because you don't have a PR team pitching on your behalf. That's how stories get placed. Congrats!
- agustif 5y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html +1
simonw 5y ago
This is such an inspiring story: building a business on an open source competitor to Google Analytics with a tiny team and no funding is one heck of an achievement. I'm a very happy (paying) user of the product, too. I LOVE that the script is less then 2KB of JavaScript, and that their privacy design is aligned with my values. I find their dashboard UI solves my needs just fine, whereas I still can't find things easily in the GA interface despite using it for over fifteen years!
poopypoopington 5y ago
Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against your license? (Different from an entity downloading your software and self-hosting which you say is allowed)
- vanilla-almond 5y ago
  They have a blog post about the open source license they chose: GNU Affero General Public License V3 (AGPLv3). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses From their blog post: > If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open source work. > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. They won’t be able to take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing product without contributing those changes back to the original project. [emphasise mine] The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
  - rustc 5y ago
    > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      That's not entirely correct. Elastic and Mongo weren't using AGPL in the first place, they had MIT/Apache type licenses. Generally we're seeing open core/source startups moving to AGPL or proprietary source available licenses (Grafana, Sentry to name a few more).
      - rustc 5y ago
devops000 5y ago
Congrats, really! It’s ridiculous that PR news (Tech crunch etc..) are always focused on funded-startup or fundind instead of bootstrapped startup which in mine option are way more interesting!
ushakov 5y ago
Plausible is also great if you’re an agency or a SaaS hosting pages for customers and want to add analytics to your offering you can add their script tag to the head and then use the API to get the stats for every site you track they also give you the possibility to embed their dashboard for each site via iframe, which made integrating their product into ours frictionless and easy experience
- omnimus 5y ago
  Yeah 100% best integration. Lets embed secret iframe of or dashboard light or dark with backround you pick. It looks almost native everywhere
utdiscant 5y ago
I have been looking at Plausible and competitors like Fathom and others. It seems like there is limited room for innovation and differentiation when you almost can't store/track any data. How can you stay competitive long-term?
skurtcastle 5y ago
I'm a big fan of bootstrapped. It's always nice to keep things our own for as long as possible. I like how you stated that you're not going to change much and continue with the same growth vs forcing results with an investor (without one is plausible of course). I'm always keen on what if's to forcing things with interesting outcomes, lol. Well done and congrats on the rising success.
andygrd 5y ago
Kudos to the team, and the market fit for this is more and more the fact that it's NOT Google, and therefore at least somewhat trustworthy. More power to you guys and here's hoping for 10x ARR this this 12 months.
necovek 5y ago
I am a bit perplexed at claiming an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) with not even a year of profits. Is it customary to use extrapolations/projections to measure ARR in the startup/business world? Even projections based on less than a year of data?
- dchuk 5y ago
  Very common, yes.
- ezekg 5y ago
  The definition of ARR is MRR * 12.
number6 5y ago
"To anonymize these datapoints, we run them through a hash function with a rotating salt. `hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)`" Isn't this just PII with extra steps? OK it's at least better then the traditional approach. Keep in mind though that anonymizing is also a use of personal data in it self and requires a legal basis. https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-privacy/german-federal-commissioner-for-data-protection-and-freedom-of-information-launched-public-consultation-on-anonymization/ https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-privacy/german-federal-co...
- y4mi 5y ago
  You seem to be confused about what PII is (which I think you meant from context). None of the listed informations are PII, nor do they become that in aggregation. But if it was, it most likely would be enough anyway if the salt isn't stored anywhere. An irreversible hash of data is enough anonymization
  - number6 5y ago
    You are right: PII. Sorry. So PII are Informationen that enable someone to identify a person as a unique person. On the homepage is stated: "This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day." Where the definition of personal data is: "(1) 'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;" So if the listed information isn't PII (an IP address however is PII) then it would become PII if you can identify a unique visitor with it. Am I wrong here? It sounds to me that this hash fits the definition of Art. 4
    - rvnx 5y ago
      This is equivalent of replacing the IP address with a pseudonym that is rotated daily per each IP address. Privacy improvements using crypto is somewhat marketing, but here the numbers show that they have a really good product, an impressive revenue model and a good marketing message so I think that's what we should look at. Technically, at the end of the day, they store utm_source, they store the IP address (just in an encoded form with a salt + day added to it). -> So yeah, you can be tracked, but in theory you will appear under a pseudonymised hash of your IP+UA.
0898 5y ago
Long time Plausible user here. They are the “good guys” of analytics.
moralestapia 5y ago
>we only obsess about our customers, their needs and about removing Google Analytics from the web. LOL, nice.
juddlyon 5y ago
Plausible is really well done. I’m happy to pay for it.
mekster 5y ago
Saying it's a Google analytics alternative is quite far stretched. It doesn't have any user journey but only entry and exit, no A/B testing, no heatmap for click and scrolls. If it doesn't provide any actionable intels, you don't call that analytics but just a counter. Check Countly's intro video on what analytics is. Though the base is open source, most of its analytics features are behind enterprise edition. https://youtu.be/sQCUNSzfEW8 https://youtu.be/sQCUNSzfEW8 For an open source solution, you might want to look at PostHog instead. (But paid plans exist for some features.)
- mritchie712 5y ago
  When I logged into Google Analytics, I really only wanted to see: - # of visitors / sessions over time - where those people were coming from After that, most of GA's features were wasted on me. Plausible has the two things above, so for me it's a valid alternative.
giorgioz 5y ago
I feel like ARR is a vanity metric compared to MRR. In the SaaS industry MRR is the most commonly used metric. ARR = 12 MRR 500k ARR = 41k MRR ARR is just used in the title caused it's a bigger number and makes it look more impressive.

206 points by tacon 5y ago

That is a nice journey guys. I just need x10 to reach your ARR. Currently doing AMA on IH about my bootstrapping project which made ~$50k revenue in less then year. https://www.indiehackers.com/post/bootstrapped-my-saas-to-50k-revenue-in-less-than-1-year-ama-840ba046d6 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/bootstrapped-my-saas-to-50...

tacon 5y ago

>If you hear about Plausible these days, it likely comes from one of our 4,802 paying customers. People who use and enjoy using Plausible help us spread the word to even more people. >We have a $0 paid advertising budget and we don’t have an affiliate program either. We pretty much ignore all the best marketing practices. This is very impressive, but I am not sure it generalizes to the average bootstrapped startup.

paulgb 5y ago
> I am not sure it generalizes I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be best practices if it did :) Still, it's nice to see that the model can work. As a happy customer, I'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable. When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone, incentives are very aligned for them to make the user experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andrewljohnson 5y ago
That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C). Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on marketing until around a million annual revenue.
- skadamat 5y ago
  +1 this, we bootstrapped at Dataquest and word of mouth played a big role
tyingq 5y ago
I don't know what else they did, but smartystreets.com did a great job with word of mouth. They would find forums with questions about address correction, and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their software. Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the post in a tactful way. I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.
rp1 5y ago
Marketing can help, but if people don’t love your product enough to tell others about it, then it’s going to be hard to get traction.
- garbagecoder 5y ago
  Have you heard of Windows?
mritchie712 5y ago
> ignore all the best marketing practices Not sure how they're missing this, but they are not ignoring best practices. Content and SEO are fundamental marketing practices. This post and their entire blog is content and SEO. I guess they think it sounds cool to say "we don't care about marketing", but they are marketing the same way most bootstrappers people would tell you to.

andrewaylett 5y ago

One of those happy customers here -- I've always shied away from having any analytics, because my websites typically set no cookies and make no third-party requests. I'd prefer to be privacy-preserving than to see how little traffic my site gets. Now with Plausible I still have no cookies or third-party requests on my websites, but I get to see numbers too.

XCSme 5y ago
> No third-party requests on my websites I assume you are using the self-hosted version?
- hootbootscoot 5y ago
  or proxying https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction
  - XCSme 5y ago
    But this still sends third-party requests, only that from your server, not the user. This is not a privacy-friendly technique, but the opposite of it.
    - andrewaylett 5y ago
      My take is that there are two factors at play here: * Third party requests from the browser are problematic in general for technical and privacy reasons: it's impossible for the browser to know whether the request is privacy-preserving or not. And they need to be enabled in tooling like CSP. It's much easier not to have any. * Third-party requests from my server don't give me any more information than I had before. I could store my logs and process them, or I can engage a third-party to aggregate my data for me. Plausible have no way to know that the requests I'm sending aren't entirely fictitious, and I can sleep slightly more soundly knowing that there's one less moving part that I need to maintain myself.

ryneandal 5y ago

This is awesome, but I had no idea what ARR was. Perhaps it's not ideal to have that acronym in the article's title.

SCUSKU 5y ago
Annual recurring revenue. It is a term frequently used by the indie hacker community in addition to MRR for monthly recurring revenue.
- kfarr 5y ago
  It's also used by publicly traded software companies, not obscure and easily researchable term IMHO
- ryneandal 5y ago
  I realized it's meaning once I read the article, but I don't think abbreviations should be used in article titles. Things like APA style guides state you shouldn't use abbreviations in titles, it should be accessible to non-experts.
Brendinooo 5y ago
It's okay if you don't know and it's definitely okay to ask! They do tell you what it means in the second paragraph, though.

wcd-fyi 5y ago

I have been using plausible on my small personal site for about a year now. When I emailed their support to ask a question I got a helpful response from one of the founders within an hour. Good experience overall, and I appreciate their efforts to protect the privacy of visitors while still providing useful data for site owners.

felixthehat 5y ago
Same, had an issue last week (which turned out to be my fault) and I also had generous help from the founders, and they were cheerfully gracious when I apologised for wasting their time. I have recommended them to several clients.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tnolet 5y ago

I might be projecting, but this is another company doing well enabled by tech like Clickhouse. Tinybird is another. Timeseries and event metrics are just so snappy, and the API and product (Clickhouse this is) are enabling small teams to do crazy cool new stuff. (We're a Plausible and Clickhouse user at my company)

skadamat 5y ago

Besides resources like Indie Hackers, I highly recommend everyone here read Small Giants (https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...) which focuses on companies that have outsized impact feeling the pressure to grow. They profile companies that have 2 to 2,000 (or so?) people, but most focus on having an opinionated take (over growth for its own sake).

langitbiru 5y ago

The co-founders met each other on Twitter: https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing They are remote co-founders, if you will.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
Woah, the real question is what on earth kind of "marketing" did Marko activate? Astronomical switch for them. Would love to read more about the tactics. This image blows my mind. Basically from 0 to 50,000 uniques in month?! Congrats https://microfounder.com/storage/posts/originals/sjswkbxufvlqrc2.png https://microfounder.com/storage/posts/originals/sjswkbxufvl...
- langitbiru 5y ago
  He shared his marketing strategy here: https://www.starterstory.com/privacy-firendly-web-analytics-tool https://www.starterstory.com/privacy-firendly-web-analytics-... The answers are content marketing and spreading words in niche tech communities.

jensneuse 5y ago

I'm very happy for you! Still a happy paying customer. I've recently upped my plan. =) One thing, could you please stop the "too many redirects" problems? It's annoying.. -_-

u385639 5y ago

> We do miss out on getting featured in the tech media. TechCrunch published a story about our growth once (thanks to the VCs who were sharing a list of fastest growing open source startup) but otherwise, we get no coverage that VC-funded startups get. This isn't because you're bootstrapped, it's likely because you don't have a PR team pitching on your behalf. That's how stories get placed. Congrats!

agustif 5y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html +1

simonw 5y ago

This is such an inspiring story: building a business on an open source competitor to Google Analytics with a tiny team and no funding is one heck of an achievement. I'm a very happy (paying) user of the product, too. I LOVE that the script is less then 2KB of JavaScript, and that their privacy design is aligned with my values. I find their dashboard UI solves my needs just fine, whereas I still can't find things easily in the GA interface despite using it for over fifteen years!

poopypoopington 5y ago

Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against your license? (Different from an entity downloading your software and self-hosting which you say is allowed)

vanilla-almond 5y ago
They have a blog post about the open source license they chose: GNU Affero General Public License V3 (AGPLv3). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses From their blog post: > If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically prevents corporations that never had any intention to contribute to open source from profiting from the open source work. > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. They won’t be able to take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing product without contributing those changes back to the original project. [emphasise mine] The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
- rustc 5y ago
  > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically competing with an open source project. Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    That's not entirely correct. Elastic and Mongo weren't using AGPL in the first place, they had MIT/Apache type licenses. Generally we're seeing open core/source startups moving to AGPL or proprietary source available licenses (Grafana, Sentry to name a few more).
    - rustc 5y ago

devops000 5y ago

Congrats, really! It’s ridiculous that PR news (Tech crunch etc..) are always focused on funded-startup or fundind instead of bootstrapped startup which in mine option are way more interesting!

ushakov 5y ago

Plausible is also great if you’re an agency or a SaaS hosting pages for customers and want to add analytics to your offering you can add their script tag to the head and then use the API to get the stats for every site you track they also give you the possibility to embed their dashboard for each site via iframe, which made integrating their product into ours frictionless and easy experience

omnimus 5y ago
Yeah 100% best integration. Lets embed secret iframe of or dashboard light or dark with backround you pick. It looks almost native everywhere

utdiscant 5y ago

I have been looking at Plausible and competitors like Fathom and others. It seems like there is limited room for innovation and differentiation when you almost can't store/track any data. How can you stay competitive long-term?

skurtcastle 5y ago

I'm a big fan of bootstrapped. It's always nice to keep things our own for as long as possible. I like how you stated that you're not going to change much and continue with the same growth vs forcing results with an investor (without one is plausible of course). I'm always keen on what if's to forcing things with interesting outcomes, lol. Well done and congrats on the rising success.

andygrd 5y ago

Kudos to the team, and the market fit for this is more and more the fact that it's NOT Google, and therefore at least somewhat trustworthy. More power to you guys and here's hoping for 10x ARR this this 12 months.

necovek 5y ago

I am a bit perplexed at claiming an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) with not even a year of profits. Is it customary to use extrapolations/projections to measure ARR in the startup/business world? Even projections based on less than a year of data?

dchuk 5y ago
Very common, yes.
ezekg 5y ago
The definition of ARR is MRR * 12.

number6 5y ago

"To anonymize these datapoints, we run them through a hash function with a rotating salt. `hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)`" Isn't this just PII with extra steps? OK it's at least better then the traditional approach. Keep in mind though that anonymizing is also a use of personal data in it self and requires a legal basis. https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-privacy/german-federal-commissioner-for-data-protection-and-freedom-of-information-launched-public-consultation-on-anonymization/ https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-privacy/german-federal-co...

y4mi 5y ago
You seem to be confused about what PII is (which I think you meant from context). None of the listed informations are PII, nor do they become that in aggregation. But if it was, it most likely would be enough anyway if the salt isn't stored anywhere. An irreversible hash of data is enough anonymization
- number6 5y ago
  You are right: PII. Sorry. So PII are Informationen that enable someone to identify a person as a unique person. On the homepage is stated: "This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day." Where the definition of personal data is: "(1) 'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;" So if the listed information isn't PII (an IP address however is PII) then it would become PII if you can identify a unique visitor with it. Am I wrong here? It sounds to me that this hash fits the definition of Art. 4
  - rvnx 5y ago
    This is equivalent of replacing the IP address with a pseudonym that is rotated daily per each IP address. Privacy improvements using crypto is somewhat marketing, but here the numbers show that they have a really good product, an impressive revenue model and a good marketing message so I think that's what we should look at. Technically, at the end of the day, they store utm_source, they store the IP address (just in an encoded form with a salt + day added to it). -> So yeah, you can be tracked, but in theory you will appear under a pseudonymised hash of your IP+UA.

0898 5y ago

Long time Plausible user here. They are the “good guys” of analytics.

moralestapia 5y ago

>we only obsess about our customers, their needs and about removing Google Analytics from the web. LOL, nice.

juddlyon 5y ago

Plausible is really well done. I’m happy to pay for it.

mekster 5y ago

Saying it's a Google analytics alternative is quite far stretched. It doesn't have any user journey but only entry and exit, no A/B testing, no heatmap for click and scrolls. If it doesn't provide any actionable intels, you don't call that analytics but just a counter. Check Countly's intro video on what analytics is. Though the base is open source, most of its analytics features are behind enterprise edition. https://youtu.be/sQCUNSzfEW8 https://youtu.be/sQCUNSzfEW8 For an open source solution, you might want to look at PostHog instead. (But paid plans exist for some features.)

mritchie712 5y ago
When I logged into Google Analytics, I really only wanted to see: - # of visitors / sessions over time - where those people were coming from After that, most of GA's features were wasted on me. Plausible has the two things above, so for me it's a valid alternative.

giorgioz 5y ago

I feel like ARR is a vanity metric compared to MRR. In the SaaS industry MRR is the most commonly used metric. ARR = 12 MRR 500k ARR = 41k MRR ARR is just used in the title caused it's a bigger number and makes it look more impressive.