[Semaphor]

We don’t need any of the advanced features Google Analytics offers. But when I look at the replacements, they also lack basic ones.

A simple one would be showing me the visitors to /blog/ and its subdirectories. And from there allow drilling down to them.

And from a UX perspective, none of them seem to support searching for a specific page to display the stats for. Yes, you can edit the URL, but that’s a horrible way to do it.

edit: To add, they are also very expensive. Above 1 million views/month (which I would say is still a pretty small commercial site) goatcounter already is in "ask us" territory and plausible wants $69/month. As the value add seems very small, we rather use our own homegrown, bare-bones analytics system for anyone who doesn’t consent to analytics.

[markosaric]

Plausible can actually do that and we have the same exact use case showing in our live demo (filtering by /blog/ only and allowing filtering per blog post). See https://plausible.io/plausible.io and click on "Visit /blog*" in the Goal Conversion section.

(I'm the co-founder of Plausible)

[Semaphor]

It does not. I used /blog/ as an example because it’s what Plausible has. But no sub-sites of /blog/ are listed, for example /blog/growing-saas-mrr.

[markosaric]

Look into the Top Pages report on the linked page for the full list of all blog posts ranked by popularity. Click on the individual post to filter the dashboard by traffic to that post only.

[capableweb]

I guess what Semaphor is saying is that there is no nesting. Taking a look at "docs" as an example, you have these entries in "Top Pages" from https://plausible.io/plausible.io:

- /docs/self-hosting 4.1k 5.7k 67%

- /docs/ 2.1k 2.7k 30%

- /docs 1.6k 2.1k 15%

- /docs/self-hosting-configuration 1.2k 1.8k 57%

You have to select "/docs/self-hosting" directly, and once you done that, you don't see the subpages of that page anymore. If you select "/docs" you only see docs, not "/docs" + subpages so you can see the most popular blogpost and only pages under "/docs"

[markosaric]

We haven't set it for our docs on the live demo but we have set it up for /blog this exact use case. On our live demo scroll all the way down to Goal Conversions and click on "Visit /blog*". This gives you a filtered dashboard and on that filtered dashboard if you look at the Top Pages report you will see only the blog posts ranked by popularity and no other content that's outside of the /blog.

[Semaphor]

Ah, now I understand. Seems a bit convoluted, but then so is almost everything in GA ;)

[arp242]

> Above 1 million views/month (which I would say is still a pretty small commercial site) goatcounter already is in "ask us" territory

I can give some context on this: determining a good pricing on these kind of things is rather tricky. In principle this is easy: "cost + markup". But "costs" is actually pretty variable and independent of number of pageviews as such: sending 1 million pageviews on a single path is cheap. Sending them spread out over 1 million paths is much more expensive.

For smaller sites this is not a big deal, but above a certain amount this can matter a lot. I don't want to overcharge "light" users, but I also don't want to undercharge "heavy" users.

Basically, figuring out a good pricing is just hard. One of the goals is to be a viable alternative for GA for at least a bunch of use cases (though not all), and being cheap is part of that. This is the entire reason there's a free plan in the first place: when I started working on this there was no real alternative: you either had to shell out money or self-host, which is too high of a barrier for many people's blogs and whatnot (especially if they're not technical and will have trouble self-hosting). It's all a bit of a balancing act.

> And from a UX perspective, none of them seem to support searching for a specific page to display the stats for. Yes, you can edit the URL, but that’s a horrible way to do it.

That is supported, unless I misunderstand what you mean?

[marvinblum]

1 Million for $36: https://pirsch.io/ and you can click on any path to filter the statistics.