Counter.dev never asks you for money, and never asks you to stop

63 lands in the Usable band from the widest spread in this file. Freedom scores 88, the highest number here: no cookies, no IP logging and no fingerprinting, with visitor country resolved at the Cloudflare edge so the address never reaches storage at all. That is a more thorough answer to GDPR than the anonymise-the-last-octet approach most tools offer.

Feature depth scores 34, the lowest in the category. Counter.dev counts traffic and does nothing else: visitors, pageviews, referrers, countries, browsers, operating systems and screen sizes. No events, no goals, no funnels, no replay, no heatmaps. Generosity at 78 reflects a service with no quotas at all, held just short of the top because there is no stated ceiling to point at and no way to know how much traffic it will absorb. The pillar reasoning below covers both ends.

Nothing is metered, which makes this section shorter than usual and the risks harder to price (as of July 2026):

• No published quotas, feature gates or time limits. Nothing is held back from people who pay nothing, and payment is never required.
• The feature set is the narrowest in this category. Traffic counting only, and that is the design rather than a free-tier restriction.
• No published data retention policy that we could find, which matters if you ever have to answer that question in an audit.
• Funding is thin by the author's own published figures, so plan for the service to change or stop rather than assuming it will be there in five years.
• No company support to call, and the dashboard and documentation are basic.

One number we deliberately do not repeat: third-party sites mention a 3 euro a month donation tier, and we could not confirm it on counter.dev itself, so it is not stated here as fact. The founding year is not published first-party either, so our record leaves it blank rather than guessing.

Self-hosting is available under AGPL-3.0 through a separate counter.dev-selfhost repository, running on Go, Redis and SQL, which is the answer if the durability question bothers you more than the setup does.

There is no free plan in the usual sense here because there is no paid plan either. The site describes itself as a free and privacy-friendly analytics service for everyone, with a pay-when-ready model, and nothing changes about the product whether you pay or not.

What is worth doing before you install it is reading the funding. A first-party blog post from September 2022 reported 350 euros in donations across 26 distinct payments for the year to that point, working out at roughly 27 cents per active user per month. Publishing that is unusually honest, and it also tells you exactly what scale of operation is behind your analytics.

So the pricing conversation here is not about tiers, it is about reciprocity and risk. If you use it, pay something, because the economics are visible and thin. If the data matters commercially, export it periodically and do not make it load-bearing, because a hobby-scale service has hobby-scale continuity regardless of how good the author's intentions are.

The self-hosted route is the version to run if you need certainty. It is the same AGPL-3.0 software on a server you control, and it costs whatever your smallest VPS costs.

Yes. We are landing above where a 63 usually sits, and the reason is that nothing about this service is metered, timed or held back: payment is never required and no quota exists to hit. The score is dragged down by feature depth, which is about what the tool does rather than what it costs, so on the narrow question this page asks the answer is unambiguous.

Who should use it: personal sites and side projects where any billing relationship feels like overkill, privacy absolutists who want the smallest possible data footprint, developers who want an AGPL service they could also self-host. On privacy it is the strongest option in this category, and it is not close.

Who should not: anyone whose analytics are commercially load-bearing, because the funding is thin by the author's own figures and there is no company behind it. Anyone needing events, goals or funnels, which it does not do at any price. And anyone who has to document a data retention policy, because none is published.

Put it on your blog, pay the author what a coffee costs, and use something with a company behind it for the business site. Umami's free plan is the obvious step up, free Counter.dev alternatives lists the rest, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.