[jehb]

Two assumptions there I'd challenge.

1) Pageviews do not equal revenue. The purpose of every website isn't inherently to make money.

2) The purpose of analytics is to understand your visitors and their interaction with content. There doesn't need to be a profit motive to want to do this. I've worked on plenty of nonprofit, informational, and discussion sites where we use analytics to discover what content is resonating with what kind of an audience, how people are discovering the site, what paths people take through the content, where errors are occurring, or just congratulate authors for writing things that got a lot of reads.

[pembrook]

Why not free Google analytics? "...but evil big tech and data privacy"

Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and free)? "...but it's not actually free if you have to spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it"

Forgive my snark, but that's usually how these conversations tend to go.

Even if you're a non-profit, if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong.

Ultimately, the main takeaway is, it doesn't matter how low or high the price is. Some people just believe they're entitled to a world where everything works perfectly for their needs and they never have to pay for it. I suggest ignoring those people--because you'll never make them happy.

[jehb]

I'm not sure who you're arguing with about GA and self-hosted Plausible. I use each, for different projects in different circumstances.

> Even if you're a non-profit, if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong.

Again, not every website exists to make money. My friend's foodie blog. My wife's not-for-profit farm project homepage. My local community discussion forum. The little page I threw together to support another friend's open source project. Going back to the original comment, these sites 1) could use analytics that respect visitor's freedom and 2) have a budget of fewer than $42 a month for the entire project.

You might be surprised at how many zero-budget hobby sites get to 500k page views a month. Especially discussion forums. I think I may have hit that threshold with a WarCraft II discussion forum I ran when I was a teen in the 90s. But back then, we stuck anything on our sites with abandon, including the "hit counters" I used for "analytics", and all sorts of guestbooks and other nonsense. Not just JavaScript, we'd drop Perl and PHP scripts straight into our CGI-BIN folders that did who-knows-what with user data. I just would have hoped the state of web analytics for the hobbyist website operator wouldn't be quite so depressing 25 years later.

[dspillett]

> You might be surprised at how many zero-budget hobby sites get to 500k page views a month.

Similarly, you might be surprised how much it can cost to support a SaaS service scaled for a great many 500K+ views/month sites: infrastructure for recording the data and rendering it back out as reports, monitoring and growin/reshaping that infrastructure as needed, meeting user support expectations, etc.

The SaaS service is operating as a business, not a pubic service.

If there is something I learned releasing simple software and slapping websites together back in the late 90s, is that there are no end of people who are convinced you are missing a trick by not offering what they want under the conditions (price usually being a key one of those conditions) they want it. You can't make all of them happy, you can't serve every market expectation, to try is to guarantee burnout of you business, yourself, and (if more than a one-man-band) your people.

Of course if they've genuinely missed a golden combination of features and pricing strategy, why not capitalise on that untapped market? Or use another product that is trying to tap it already.

[jehb]

I'm not arguing anyone should provide this service for free. I'm suggesting "if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong" is not helpful, nor is "if you're not running a business, why do you care about analytics at all?"

While there are some corners of the web dedicated to making money, that's not a goal for many (most?) websites, and yes, those websites can also use analytics.

Maybe the only way to get analytics for those webmasters is to subsidize the cost by handing personal data on every single visitor over to Google, because maybe it really does cost $500 a year per site for third party to host analytics software for you. If so, we spent three decades creating what turns out to be a pretty shitty experience for creators and consumers on the web.

[satvikpendem]

> Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and free)? "...but it's not actually free if you have to spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it"

Not really. For example I use Plausible self-hosted through Coolify (open source Heroku alternative) which has a one click add service feature, it has quite a few services including a full blown Nextcloud instance too I believe. It works well because it's all Docker.

I don't have to worry about it after the one click. It even auto updates.