I Built Cookie-Free Website Analytics So You Never Need a Consent Banner Again

Aven Support — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:31:49 +0000

The Problem: Every Website Needs a Cookie Banner (Because of Analytics)
If you've built a website for anyone in the EU in the last few years, you know the drill:

Add Google Analytics
Google Analytics sets cookies
Now you need a cookie consent banner
Now you need a Cookie Policy page
Now you need a Consent Management Platform
Now you need to document it in your Privacy Policy
Now your legal team needs to review it quarterly
All of this... just to know how many people visited your homepage.

I got tired of it. So I built something different.

What If Analytics Just Didn't Use Cookies?
The core insight is simple: most analytics data doesn't require cookies at all.

Think about what you actually check in Google Analytics:

How many pageviews did I get today?
Where is my traffic coming from?
Which pages are most popular?
What countries are my visitors from?
What devices/browsers are they using?
None of this requires identifying individual users. None of it requires storing anything on the visitor's browser. None of it requires cookies.

How Cookie-Free Tracking Works
Instead of setting cookies to identify returning visitors, Privacy Analytics uses a combination of:

Aggregate counting — We count pageviews, not people. Each page load increments a counter. No user-level tracking needed.
Request headers — The HTTP request itself contains useful data: referrer (where they came from), user-agent (browser/device), accept-language (likely country). This is data the browser sends voluntarily on every request.
No IP storage — We process the IP address to derive the country, then immediately discard it. The IP is never stored in our database.
No fingerprinting — We don't combine signals to create a unique visitor fingerprint. That would defeat the purpose.
The result: you get all the analytics data you actually use, without collecting any personal data.

The Technical Implementation
The tracking script is under 1KB (yes, really — 90x smaller than Google Analytics):

That's it. One script tag. 30-second setup.

When a visitor loads your page, the script sends a single POST request to our API with:

The page URL (what page they're on)
The referrer (where they came from)
Screen width (mobile vs desktop)
Timestamp
That's all. No cookies set. No localStorage. No sessionStorage. No IndexedDB. Nothing stored on the visitor's device.

What You Get
Despite collecting zero personal data, you still get a comprehensive dashboard:

Pageviews & unique visitors (estimated via daily aggregation, not individual tracking)
Traffic sources — Direct, organic search, social, referral links
Top pages — Which content performs best
Geographic breakdown — Country-level (derived from IP, then IP discarded)
Device & browser stats — Mobile vs desktop, Chrome vs Firefox, etc.
Custom events — Track button clicks, form submissions, signups
Real-time data — See who's on your site right now (without knowing who they are)
Why This Matters for GDPR
Under GDPR, you need a legal basis to process personal data. Google Analytics processes personal data (via cookies, IP addresses, and user identifiers), so you need:

A cookie consent banner
User consent before loading GA
A Data Processing Agreement with Google
Documentation in your Privacy Policy
Regular privacy impact assessments
With cookie-free analytics that doesn't collect personal data, none of this applies. The French data protection authority (CNIL) and the Austrian DSB have both confirmed that cookie-free analytics tools that don't collect personal data are exempt from consent requirements.

This means:

No cookie banner cluttering your site
No consent management platform to pay for
No users bouncing because they hate cookie popups
100% of visitors tracked (vs ~30-50% who decline cookies)
The Agency Use Case
This has been the most popular feature: multi-site management.

If you're an agency managing 10 client websites, you currently need:

10 Google Analytics properties
10 cookie consent configurations
10 Privacy Policy updates
Ongoing compliance monitoring for all 10
With Privacy Analytics, you just add the script tag to each site. Done. No compliance overhead. The Agency plan ($39/mo) covers 10 sites with 500K pageviews.

Pricing
I wanted to keep it simple and affordable:

Plan Sites Pageviews/mo Price
Free 1 1,000 $0
Starter 3 50,000 $7/mo
Growth 5 200,000 $15/mo
Agency 10 500,000 $39/mo
Scale 25 2,000,000 $79/mo
No credit card required for the free tier.

Try It
You can see it in action at analytics.avenvertex.com.

Setup takes 30 seconds:

Create a free account
Add your site
Copy the script tag into your

Start seeing data immediately
I'd love to hear your thoughts. What analytics data do you actually check regularly? Is there something you'd need that cookie-free tracking can't provide?

Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and a deep frustration with cookie consent banners.

DEV Community: Aven Support

I Built Cookie-Free Website Analytics So You Never Need a Consent Banner Again