Google Analytics is free but costs your users their privacy (and your site its Core Web Vitals score — the GA4 script is 45KB+ and still growing). So like every indie hacker in 2024, I went self-hosted Plausible. Six months later I ripped it out. Here's why, and what replaced it.
The Numbers After 6 Months of Self-Hosted Plausible
- VPS cost: $6/month (needed 2GB RAM — ClickHouse alone eats ~1.2GB idle)
- Maintenance: ClickHouse corrupted twice. Both times I lost ~2 days of events restoring.
- RAM pressure: OOM-killed Postgres once during a Hacker News spike (the exact moment you most want analytics)
- Total cost of ownership: $36 + roughly 6 hours of sysadmin work
The $0 Replacement: Umami + Railway + Neon
Umami gives you 90% of Plausible's dashboard — pageviews, referrers, UTM, events, funnels — with a plain Postgres backend instead of ClickHouse. That one architectural choice changes everything about hosting cost.
My current stack:
| Component | Service | Free tier | My usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Umami app | Railway (trial) → moved to my existing VPS | $0 (Docker, ~300MB RAM) | ~40MB/day traffic |
| Postgres | Neon free tier | 0.5GB storage, autoscaling | 180MB after 4 months |
| Tracking script | Self-hosted | 2KB (vs GA4's 45KB) | — |
Setup was genuinely 15 minutes:
docker run -d --name umami \
-e DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@host.neon.tech/umami \
-p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/umami-software/umami:postgresql-latest
Then one line on the site:
<script defer src="https://umami.mydomain.com/script.js" data-website-id="..."></script>
The Controversial Take
You probably don't need "real" analytics at all. After 6 months of watching Plausible dashboards, I can count on one hand the decisions I actually made from the data. Referrers (which post drove traffic) and top pages — that's 95% of the value, and Umami's free self-hosted version does both.
Plausible-the-company is great and their hosted product ($9/month) is fair. But self-hosting Plausible in 2026 is the worst of both worlds: you do the sysadmin work AND you still don't get the full feature set (their hosted funnel analysis is ahead of the open-source release).
Four months on the Umami stack: zero downtime, zero maintenance, $0/month, and my PageSpeed score went up 6 points from dropping GA4's script weight.
I sketched the Neon schema-migration checklist with MonkeyCode when moving my historical events over — free tier was plenty for this: https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF
What analytics are you running on your side projects — GA4, self-hosted, or have you just stopped tracking entirely?
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