I’ve been recommending Plausible and Simple Analytics to clients and companies for almost two years while my personal website runs Google Analytics (GA). 

I use GA because it’s free and I want to keep my personal costs as low as possible. I used to recommend Plausible and Simple because they’re smaller companies doing good stuff - but I didn’t want the cost.

Then I started thinking about it. Why aren’t they free? Well, because they need to make money. So how is Google Analytics free? They’re definitely not a non-profit or public service after all. 

It’s free because they make money selling or using their user’s information.

What ‘free analytics’ means

Gmail is free. Facebook is free. Google Analytics is free. These are not services run by charities that want to help users do great things. 

They are data collection cogs working in an advertising machine that’s so embedded in how we live we don’t notice it. At least I didn’t. 

Google isn't in the analytics business, they work for attention. Every session, click, and behaviour pattern a website sends to Google Analytics gets folded into their system that makes Ads more precise.

This is just how it is. It’s not even necessarily inherently bad - but if you run a website with GA I bet you didn’t know that’s what you were signing up for. 

Because you did sign up for it. It’s in the Ts&Cs no one reads. 

Hidden cost of Google Analytics

Raise your hand if you’ve heard of GDPR. Keep your hand up if you know what it stands for and what it means. I’ve put my hand down, I’m not going to explain it but there’s one important  part for this purpose. 

Under GDPR rules, sending EU website visitor data abroad requires consent. Consent means websites need to install a cookie banner. Cookie banners mean somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of visitors ‘decline’ or ‘reject’ giving access to their data.

EU privacy law requires consent before a website can set non-essential tracking cookies - what Google Analytics uses. Consent means a cookie banner. And cookie banners mean a significant portion of visitors either decline or simply ignore the banner and disappear from your data.

A study in November 2025 suggests the total data loss from cookie-based analytics sits somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of actual visitors, depending on how the banner is designed.

Missing data

When someone clicks ‘reject’ or ‘decline’ on your website that is using Google Analytics, the data you ‘analyse’ is incomplete. When you present a visitor a cookie banner it’s also likely that the reader just ignores it. This means the data you ‘analyse’ is missing a lot of information. 

Using Google Analytics costs data completeness.

Maintaining cookies

When someone clicks anything on a cookie banner on a website they’re clicking something that someone has installed and maintains on a website. Using Google Analytics means you need someone to do this. 

Legal risk

If you're running a big website with heaps of visitors and your cookies aren’t configured correctly you’re opening yourself up to legal risk. Using free Google Analytics is risky and requires legalese if you’re successful. 

You don’t need those cookies.

If you’d have said this to me a week ago I would have squinted at you in thought. Don’t I? But everyone collects cookies.

In actuality, some cookies are essential for websites to run on today’s internet and so they’re just there - you don’t need to give your consent or not because without them the website wouldn’t work.

But any cookie you do need to give your consent to, you don’t need. 

Google Analytics alternatives like Plausible and Simple Analytics don’t ask users to accept cookies. They’re cookie-less. 

They collect none of the user’s personal data and run on EU servers to comply with regulation. They only collect the data you need/have configured it to collect, so the data you track is consistent. 

Numbers on invoices aren’t the only expense

The cost of most things can be evaluated by the number you see on the invoice. That’s a nice safe sentence that I think is true. But now I want to add a caveat:

The cost of most things can be evaluated by the number you see on the invoice - unless the number is 0. 

€9 a month for Plausible versus €0 a month looks like an obvious decision. I made the obvious decision myself. 

€15 a month for 10 sites on Simple Analytics  versus €0 plus a cookie implementation, plus legal exposure, plus a potentially huge blind spot in user data … is different.

This is the same logic that makes "free" open source software (FOSS) sometimes more expensive than a paid alternative. The licence is free. The setup, maintenance, and support aren't. Except FOSS is clear about it - free is just a starting point.

Value beyond cost

There's a third cost I keep thinking about too.

Every time someone visits my site, I’m sending their behaviour to Google's advertising machine. For my personal blog like the one you’re reading, that feels uncomfortable but honestly, I could live with it.

For the mission-driven organisations that I work with, it feels like a contradiction - handing an audience's data to a system that exists to sell them things … I don’t like it. 

Plausible is Lithuanian. Simple Analytics is Dutch. Both are independent, profitable companies. They have no ad network, no data resale, and no ulterior motive (that I know of). That's not a small thing when you're thinking about where your money goes and whose values to support.

Choose better analytics

So why do we do it? Why do all websites seem to have Google Analytics running with big ol’ cookie banners? 

Because, like me, they don’t think about it. It’s what everyone does. How quickly and without thinking do you just accept, reject, or ignore cookie banners when you visit websites? I’m going to start thinking more about it and I’m going to migrate from Google Analytics to Plausible or Simple Analytics - I just need to check if they have a free plan 😉