[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.