Thanks for mentioning Plausible @LostKobrakai. I’ve been working on it for about a year now.

I’ve thought a lot about offering a self-hosted solution. To be clear, the license allows you to self-host and I’m not stopping anyone. When I say that plausible does not offer a self-hosted solution, it means that I have not taken up the responsibility for making it easy to install and upgrade. If you want to grab the code and run it, by all means go ahead.

I’m wary of offering a self-hosted solution because:
a) The product is still early stage and it would take away from my time focusing on new features
b) It’s likely that the infrastructure will evolve to a point where self-hosting is just not realistic

For instance, I’m currently moving from Postgres to Clickhouse as the database so that I can accomodate sites with >10m pageviews per month. In the future, it might be necessary to add Kafka in the data pipeline to better handle big traffic spikes etc.

There’s a tension between making the product easy to self-host vs making it cost-efficient for large customers and a free tier. For example, Matomo uses a standard MySQL database and it’s very easy to self-host. On the other hand, their hosted service is crazy expensive. With 10m monthly pageviews you’re looking at €849 per month, and that only includes 6 months data retention.

If they built a more streamlined data pipeline, it would make their product much harder to self-host but it would bring the cost of the hosted service down.

Hope that clarifies things a bit. I’m not ruling out a self-hosted version in the future, potentially with different database and ingestion adapters to simplify the infra requirements for self-hosting. However, at the moment I’m focusing on the core business and especially scaling up to larger customers.

Twitter just made me aware of an elixir based alternative: https://plausible.io/ and it’s (not yet) licensed to not allow self hosting.

I like https://usefathom.com/ either as a service or even self hosted.