Plausible charges $9–19/month, tiered by your traffic, forever. Google Analytics is "free" — paid for with your visitors' data and your consent banner. Statfox is a lightweight analytics server you run yourself: one <2KB script tag, one dashboard for every site you own, no cookies, no consent banner, no data leaving your server.
This is the full pricing breakdown: what Plausible actually costs over one, two and three years, what Statfox gives you for $129 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.
What Plausible actually costs you
At $9–19/mo, one Plausible subscription adds up to $108 every year — $324 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Statfox is $129 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.
| Statfox | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Sticker price | $129 once | $9–19/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $129 | $108 |
| Cost after 2 years | $129 | $216 |
| Cost after 3 years | $129 | $324 |
Three years in, the gap is $195 — and every year after that adds another $108 to the subscription side of the ledger.
Statfox vs Plausible, feature by feature
Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:
| Statfox | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $129 once | $9–19/month, tiered by traffic |
| Cost over 3 years | $129 | ~$324–684 |
| Sites included | Unlimited | Tiered |
| Traffic limits | None — it's your hardware | 10k–100k pageviews/mo per tier |
| Cookies / consent banner | None needed | None needed |
| Data ownership | Your server, your SQLite file | Their cloud (or complex self-host) |
| Client share links | Yes, tokenized | Yes |
| Source code | MIT, yours | Open source (AGPL), hosted paid |
What you get for $129, once
Self-hosted, cookie-free web analytics — unlimited sites & traffic, one clean dashboard. The highlights:
- 🪶 < 2KB tracking snippet — One deferred script tag. Cookie-free and GDPR-friendly — no consent banner needed.
- 🕵️ Uniques without cookies — Daily-rotating salted hash of IP + user agent. Raw IPs are never stored; yesterday's salt is deleted so hashes can't be linked across days.
- 🌐 Unlimited sites — Track every client site from one dashboard — no per-site pricing, no traffic tiers.
- 📊 The numbers that matter — Visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration — each compared to the previous period.
Under 7 months of a Plausible Growth plan pays for Statfox — then analytics on every site you'll ever build is free.
Switching is 3 steps
- Buy once on Whop. One-time $129 for the packaged version with 1-click setup and updates.
- Deploy to a $5 VPS. docker compose up -d, point analytics.yourdomain.com at it, put free Cloudflare in front and country breakdowns light up automatically. Desktop mode works for checking numbers locally.
- Paste one script tag. Add a site in the dashboard, copy the snippet, paste it into your site's head. Numbers start flowing immediately.
When paying Plausible is still the right call
Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Plausible's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $9–19/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
If that's you, Statfox is $129, once. For the deeper dive, read the Statfox vs Plausible head-to-head or the full Plausible comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/web-analytics-mvp, always. $129 buys the packaged version, 1-click setup and updates.
Is it really GDPR-friendly without a banner?
Yes — no cookies, no localStorage, no fingerprinting. Uniqueness is a daily-rotating salted hash computed in memory; raw IPs are never written to disk and old salts are deleted, so a visitor hash is meaningless after 24 hours.
Do I need a server?
For public sites, yes — the collect endpoint must be reachable from your visitors' browsers, so budget a $5 VPS. That still costs less per year than most Plausible tiers, and it can host half this suite at once.
What doesn't it do vs GA4?
Honestly: no funnels, no e-commerce revenue attribution, no Google Ads integration, no BigQuery export. Statfox covers the numbers most site owners actually check — traffic, sources, pages, countries, UTMs, custom events. If you live in GA4's advertising reports, keep GA4.
Can I track single-page apps?
Yes — the snippet hooks pushState, replaceState and popstate automatically, and you can fire custom events like statfox('signup') from anywhere.
More on Plausible pricing
Statfox — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns
Try Statfox — $129, once
Self-hosted, cookie-free web analytics — unlimited sites & traffic, one clean dashboard.