Plausible deserves enormous credit. It proved that web analytics could be simple, cookie-free and privacy-respecting — one lightweight script, one clean dashboard, no consent banner — and built a sustainable open-source business doing it. If you left Google Analytics in the last few years, there is a good chance Plausible is where you went.
But Plausible's hosted service is a subscription tiered by traffic: $9/month at 10k pageviews, climbing as your sites grow, forever. If you run several sites — or client sites — you are paying rent on a job your own $5 VPS could do. Statfox is a $49 pay-once analytics server built on the same privacy principles. Here is the honest comparison.
What Plausible does well
Plausible earns its reputation:
- Genuinely privacy-first — no cookies, no personal data, EU-hosted, and they pioneered the model.
- Fully managed — uptime, scaling, backups and a polished dashboard are somebody else's job.
- Open source (AGPL) with a self-host option, which keeps the company honest.
- Mature extras — funnels, goals, ecommerce revenue and a stats API on current plans.
If you want zero-ops analytics and the traffic tiers fit your budget, Plausible is a genuinely good citizen of the web.
Where the subscription model hurts
The subscription math compounds with success. $9/month covers 10k pageviews; grow past a tier boundary and the bill steps up — $19, $39, onward — every month, forever. Three years at the Growth tier is roughly $684. And the price is per account, not per lifetime: stop paying and the dashboard, the history, the share links all go dark. Plausible's self-hosted Community Edition exists, but it is a heavier Elixir + ClickHouse stack that they understandably de-prioritize versus the paid cloud.
There is also the multiplication problem. Agencies and indie hackers rarely run one site — they run ten. Traffic-tiered pricing means your analytics bill scales with exactly the thing you are trying to grow, while the actual server work involved (receiving tiny POST requests, counting rows) is trivial for even the cheapest VPS.
Statfox: the pay-once alternative
Statfox is a $49, one-time purchase. Privacy-first web analytics on your own server. Unlimited sites, no cookies, no monthly bill. Statfox tracks unlimited sites from one dashboard with a <2KB cookie-free snippet — visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, duration, grouped referrers, countries, devices, UTMs, custom events and a realtime view, plus tokenized read-only share links for clients. Uniques come from a daily-rotating salted hash, so raw IPs are never stored.
The source code is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/web-analytics — free to build and run yourself, forever. Buying the packaged version on Whop gets you the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates. Either way, there is no account, no telemetry and no renewal date.
Head to head
| Statfox | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $9–19/mo, tiered by traffic |
| Cost over 3 years | $49 | ~$324–684 |
| Where your data lives | Your machine / your server | Their EU cloud (or heavy self-host stack) |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited use | 10k–100k pageviews/mo per tier |
| Works offline | Yes | n/a (hosted) |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Open source (AGPL), hosted paid |
Who should stay with Plausible
Stay with Plausible if you want a zero-maintenance managed service, if you need funnels and ecommerce revenue attribution today, or if your organization requires a vendor with an SLA rather than software you run. Those are real things a subscription legitimately buys.
Switch if you are comfortable running one Docker container, you track more than one site, and the numbers you actually check are visitors, sources, pages, countries and UTMs — which is what most people open their analytics for.
Making the switch
Step 1 — Buy once on Whop. One-time $49 for the packaged version with 1-click setup and updates.
Step 2 — 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.
Step 3 — Paste one script tag. Add a site in the dashboard, copy the snippet, paste it into your site's head. Numbers start flowing immediately.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/web-analytics, always. $49 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.
The bottom line
Subscriptions make sense when a service does ongoing work for you — hosting, syncing, multi-region infrastructure, human labor. They make much less sense when the work happens on your own hardware and the monthly bill is just a toll booth. Statfox is our bet that for this job, most people are better served owning the tool: $49 once, under 3 months of a Plausible Growth plan pays for Statfox — then analytics on every site you'll ever build is free.
Statfox is part of OneTimeSuite — 56 desktop and self-hosted apps built on the same principle: your hardware does the work, so you should not pay rent on it. Every app is a one-time purchase with MIT-licensed source on GitHub, no accounts and no telemetry. Want everything at once? OneTimeSuite Complete bundles the whole suite for a single flat $997.
Try Statfox — $49, one time
Signed installer on Whop, or build it free from the MIT source. Your call.
Related comparisons: Google Analytics alternative — or browse the whole pay-once suite.