Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics is a privacy-first web analytics platform out of Amsterdam, built around a single contrarian idea: you can measure your website without cookies, without a consent banner, and without handing your visitors' data to an ad company. Founded in 2018 by Adriaan van Rossum, it's been running for years as a deliberate alternative to Google Analytics, and it has the customer logos to back the pitch. Bloomberg, Michelin, Hyundai, the UK Government, the Bank of England, the Scottish Government, Polkadot, and Sketch all show up on the site, which is unusual social proof for a tool in the indie-analytics tier. The core argument is about the consent gap. Because traditional analytics rely on cookies, they only count the visitors who accept the banner, and the company estimates that 20 to 60 percent of traffic gets lost when people decline or use ad blockers. Simple Analytics tracks without cookies or consent, so it claims to see effectively all of your visitors rather than the consenting slice. Whether the real number is closer to 20 or 60 percent depends on your audience, but the directional point holds: consent-gated tools systematically undercount, and a cookieless tool recovers the visitors they miss. It's positioned to run either alongside GA4, catching the traffic Google can't see, or as a full replacement. The privacy architecture is the engineering substance here, not a slogan. Simple Analytics deliberately does not track IP addresses, does not store data in the browser, and does not follow users across sessions or devices. There's nothing personal to leak because it never collects it. That design is what lets the company claim compliance with GDPR, PECR, the ePrivacy Directive, CNIL, DSGVO, and CCPA without needing a consent prompt, and the data is hosted in the EU for residency. SOC 2 is listed as coming soon. For a team in Europe that's tired of cookie-banner friction and nervous about regulators, this is the whole reason the product exists. Feature depth is intentionally restrained. You get the metrics most teams actually open a dashboard to see: pageviews, referrers, top pages, countries, and device breakdowns, presented in a fast, clean single-page dashboard with light and dark modes. On top of that sits an AI assistant that lets you ask questions of your data in plain language instead of clicking through filters, an API for pulling data into your own systems, and white-label options so agencies can put client-facing dashboards under their own brand. Enterprise unlocks raw data export, team reporting with filtered views, SSO, role-based access, a Looker Studio integration, and priority support. Setup is famously light, one script, no configuration, and you're collecting. Pricing is refreshingly honest. There's a genuine free-forever plan that covers unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, five websites, one user, and 30 days of history, which is enough for a personal site or to evaluate the product properly. A 14-day full trial with no credit card opens up the paid features. The self-serve plan runs $20 a month with a usage slider up to 2.5 million pageviews a month, unlimited websites, and one included user, with additional seats at $20 each. Enterprise is custom-quoted and adds the raw data, governance, and reporting features above. You can even pay in Bitcoin if you accept a 10 percent surcharge. The honest note is that pricing scales with traffic, so a high-volume site will pay meaningfully more than the headline $20, but the model is transparent about it via the slider. The real tradeoff is depth, and it's a tradeoff by design rather than an oversight. You will not get funnel analysis, cohort retention curves, or granular event tracking and session replay of the kind Mixpanel, Amplitude, or PostHog give you. If your job is to dissect a multi-step conversion path or watch how a feature changes 30-day retention, this is the wrong tool. There are two smaller caveats too: the free tier's 30-day history and five-site cap will frustrate anyone with a larger footprint who doesn't want to pay, and cookieless modeling means some of what you see is statistically estimated rather than counted exactly, which purists who want precise unique-visitor numbers should understand going in. Where it sits in the category: Simple Analytics is one of the leading names in privacy-first, cookieless web analytics, alongside Plausible, Fathom, and the self-hostable Matomo and Umami. Against Plausible and Fathom it competes on a near-identical privacy promise, with the AI assistant, the enterprise customer roster, and white-label depth as its differentiators. Who should use it? Privacy-conscious teams, EU companies that want to ditch the cookie banner, agencies that want clean branded dashboards for clients, and founders who want trustworthy pageview and referrer data with five minutes of setup. Who should skip it? Product teams whose core work is deep funnel, event, and retention analysis, that's exactly the depth this tool trades away on purpose.