DEV Community: Raah

The Best Vercel Analytics Alternative When You Outgrow the Free Tier

Arindam Majumder — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:16:35 +0000

TL;DR

Vercel Analytics is a convenient starting point for Vercel-hosted projects, especially when you only need simple traffic analytics.
The Hobby plan includes a capped monthly Web Analytics allowance. If your site grows beyond that allowance, you may need to upgrade or move to another analytics setup.
Speed Insights is separate from Web Analytics and has its own data-point limits and pricing model.
Raah is a strong Vercel Analytics alternative when you want traffic analytics, Core Web Vitals, network performance, third-party script monitoring, frontend errors, and user journeys in one dashboard.
You do not need to move your app away from Vercel to use Raah. Add one lightweight beacon and keep your existing hosting workflow.

Vercel Analytics is one of the easiest ways to add traffic analytics to a Vercel-hosted site. If you already deploy with Vercel, the setup is simple, the dashboard is clean, and the data is useful enough for many early projects.

But the free tier has limits.

On the Hobby plan, Vercel Analytics includes a capped amount of monthly Web Analytics events. Once your site grows beyond that allowance, tracking can stop until the next billing cycle unless you upgrade. Vercel also prices additional Web Analytics events on paid plans, and Speed Insights has its own separate usage model.

That is fine for some teams. But if you want predictable analytics, privacy-friendly tracking, Web Vitals, network performance, and user behavior insights in one place, you may want a Vercel Analytics alternative.

That is where Raah fits.

Why people look for a Vercel Analytics alternative

Most people do not start looking for an alternative because Vercel Analytics is hard to use. They start looking because their needs change.

Common reasons include:

Your site is growing beyond the Hobby analytics allowance.
You do not want analytics tied to your hosting provider.
You want traffic analytics and performance monitoring in one dashboard.
You need deeper frontend observability than pageviews alone.
You want cookie-free analytics without consent banner complexity.
You want to monitor Core Web Vitals, API calls, third-party scripts, and user journeys together.
You deploy across Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, custom servers, or multiple platforms.

Vercel Analytics is convenient if your whole world lives inside Vercel. Raah is built for teams that want analytics to follow the product, not the hosting provider.

Vercel Analytics free tier: what to know

Vercel's Hobby plan includes a free Web Analytics allowance, but it is capped. Vercel's public pricing also lists paid Web Analytics usage at a per-event rate on paid plans.

Speed Insights is separate from Web Analytics. On the Hobby plan, Vercel provides a free Speed Insights allowance for one project, with its own data-point limits.

That means your actual analytics setup may involve more than one usage bucket:

Web Analytics events
Speed Insights data points
Add-ons if you are on a paid plan
Usage-based pricing as traffic grows

For small personal projects, this may be enough. For a growing product, SaaS app, content site, or startup landing page, those limits can become part of your analytics decision.

For the exact current numbers, always check the official Vercel pricing page and Speed Insights limits and pricing documentation.

What to use instead: Raah

Raah is a privacy-first website analytics and frontend observability platform for developers.

You add one lightweight script to your site, and Raah gives you:

Pageviews and visitor analytics
Referrers and UTM campaign tracking
Device, browser, country, and city breakdowns
Core Web Vitals monitoring
Network request performance
API and endpoint timing
Third-party script performance
User journey visibility
Frontend error tracking
Performance alerts
Cookie-free tracking without fingerprinting

Raah is built for teams that want to understand both traffic and user experience.

Traditional analytics tools tell you what pages people visit. Raah also helps you understand whether those pages are fast, which APIs are slow, which third-party scripts are hurting performance, and where users are coming from.

Vercel Analytics vs Raah

Feature	Vercel Analytics	Raah
Basic pageview analytics	Yes	Yes
Works outside Vercel	Limited by setup and use case	Yes
Cookie-free analytics	Yes	Yes
Core Web Vitals	Via Speed Insights	Yes
Network request monitoring	Limited	Yes
API performance from the browser	Limited	Yes
Third-party script performance	Limited	Yes
User journey insights	Limited	Yes
Privacy-friendly by default	Yes	Yes
Hosting-provider independent	No	Yes

Vercel Analytics is a good fit if you want simple analytics for a Vercel project.

Raah is a better fit if you want a fuller picture of what users experience after they land on your site.

When should you switch from Vercel Analytics?

You should consider switching when analytics becomes part of how you run the product, not just something you occasionally check.

For example, switch when you want to answer questions like:

Which marketing campaigns are bringing users who actually engage?
Which pages are slow for real users?
Are API calls slowing down the user journey?
Which third-party scripts are hurting load time?
Where are users dropping off?
Are performance issues happening for specific countries, browsers, or networks?
Can I monitor analytics and frontend reliability in one dashboard?

If you only need a simple pageview counter, Vercel Analytics may be enough.

If you need traffic analytics plus real-user performance monitoring, Raah gives you a broader view.

How to add Raah to a Vercel site

You do not need to move your app away from Vercel to use Raah.

Raah works with Vercel-hosted sites, Next.js apps, React apps, Astro sites, Vue apps, Nuxt apps, SvelteKit apps, and other frontend frameworks.

The setup is usually one script tag:

<script
  defer
  src="https://t.raah.dev/script.js"
  data-pid="YOUR_PROJECT_ID"
  data-domain="YOUR_DOMAIN"
></script>

After deployment, open your Raah dashboard and visit your site. Data usually starts appearing within a few minutes.

If you use Next.js, you can also follow the framework-specific setup in the Raah beacon installation guide.

Why Raah is a strong Vercel Analytics alternative

The biggest reason to use Raah is that it combines analytics and frontend observability.

You do not just see that a page received traffic. You can see whether the experience was good.

That matters because traffic without performance context can be misleading. A campaign may bring users, but if the landing page has poor LCP, slow API calls, or a blocking third-party script, those users may leave before converting.

Raah helps you connect those dots:

Acquisition: Where users came from.
Behavior: What pages and journeys they followed.
Experience: How fast the site felt.
Reliability: Which requests, scripts, or errors affected the session.

That makes Raah useful not only for marketers, but also for founders, developers, and product teams.

Final verdict

Vercel Analytics is a convenient starting point for Vercel projects. The free Hobby allowance is useful for small sites, but growing products often need more flexibility, deeper visibility, and analytics that are not tied to one hosting platform.

If you are looking for a Vercel Analytics alternative that gives you privacy-friendly web analytics, Core Web Vitals, network performance, third-party script monitoring, and user journey insights in one dashboard, Raah is built for that.

You can keep hosting on Vercel.

Just use Raah to understand what your users are actually experiencing.

Introducing Raah

Arindam Majumder — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Today, we are introducing Raah, a privacy-first analytics and frontend observability platform for teams that need a clearer view of what real users experience in production.

Most products treat analytics, performance, errors, and uptime as separate problems. In practice, they are the same question from different angles: are people finding your product, using it, and getting a fast, reliable experience?

Raah answers that from one lightweight beacon. You get traffic analytics, Core Web Vitals, browser errors, API timing, third-party script impact, alerts, and status pages in one dashboard, without cookies or fingerprinting.

The goal is simple: help small teams move from scattered signals to production truth.

Why we built Raah

Most teams stitch together analytics, Web Vitals tooling, error tracking, uptime checks, and backend monitoring. Each tool is useful on its own, but the complete picture is still hard to read.

You may know a page received traffic, but not whether it loaded slowly. You may know an API was healthy from your server logs, but not whether users on a regional network saw high latency. You may know conversion dropped, but not whether a third-party script, JavaScript error, or poor INP contributed to the problem.

Raah is built around a simple belief: product and engineering teams should be able to see user behavior and user experience together.

What Raah gives you

Raah starts with the questions teams ask every week:

How many people visited, where did they come from, and which pages mattered?
Which pages are slow for real users, not just in a lab test?
Which API endpoints are creating the worst p95 or p99 experience?
Are errors concentrated in a browser, region, ISP, or release?
Did a marketing campaign bring traffic that actually engaged?
Can we explain an incident with real user evidence?

Instead of forcing those answers across several dashboards, Raah brings the main signals into one workflow.

Analytics without the usual privacy baggage

Raah tracks visits, pageviews, referrers, UTM campaigns, devices, geography, sessions, and engagement without setting cookies or fingerprinting users.

That makes it a practical alternative for teams that want useful product analytics without turning a simple website into a consent and tracking project.

The goal is not to recreate every enterprise marketing analytics feature. The goal is to give developers, founders, and product teams a clear read on what is happening and what deserves attention.

Frontend observability built in

Traffic alone does not tell you whether the experience was good. Raah also captures frontend reliability and performance signals from real browsers:

Core Web Vitals including LCP, CLS, INP, FCP, and TTFB
Browser-level network timing including DNS, TCP, TLS, TTFB, and download phases
API endpoint latency, error rate, and percentile breakdowns
JavaScript errors and unhandled promise rejections
Third-party script performance
Session-level context for debugging what happened

Real user network monitoring

Synthetic checks are useful, but they run from known locations under controlled conditions. They do not show what every user saw from their own browser, device, ISP, and geography.

Raah captures browser-level network telemetry from live traffic, so you can compare API and page performance by endpoint, country, ISP, status code, and timing phase.

That matters when a service looks healthy from your infrastructure but feels slow to customers in a specific region or network.

Built for small teams that need production truth

Raah is designed for teams that need practical visibility without a heavyweight rollout:

SaaS teams debugging inconsistent endpoint latency
Founders watching traffic, campaigns, performance, and reliability from one place
Agencies managing client websites without cookie-heavy analytics setups
Product teams connecting user behavior to frontend experience
Engineering teams that want alerts and evidence before users complain

You can start with a single script tag and let real traffic populate the dashboard.

Getting started

Create a project in the Raah dashboard.
Install the lightweight script.
Let live traffic populate metrics.
Use breakdowns by endpoint, ISP, geography, and session context to investigate outliers.

Raah was built to help teams move from “we think it is fine” to “we know what users are seeing.”