Counter.dev review

Cloudflare resolves the country, so the IP is never stored

Counter.dev is about as small and as principled as analytics gets. No cookies, no IP logging, no fingerprinting, and no quotas. You install a snippet, you get a dashboard of visitors, pageviews, referrers, countries, browsers, operating systems, and screen sizes, and you pay whatever you feel like paying, whenever you feel like paying it. The imprint names Irae Hueck Costa in Berlin as the person responsible, with Ana Maria Sandoval Jimenez contributing.

The privacy design is the most interesting technical detail. Rather than storing an IP address and looking up the country, Counter.dev reads the country Cloudflare has already resolved at its edge, so the IP never reaches storage at all. That is a more thorough answer to GDPR than "we anonymize the last octet", which is what most tools offer.

Side projects and privacy absolutists, mostly

• 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 analytics service they can also self-host
• People who like the pay-what-you-want model on principle

Pay what you want, which can be nothing, and no price list

There is no free plan in the usual sense, because there is no paid plan either. The site describes itself as "free and privacy friendly analytics service for everyone", with a pay-when-ready model. No quotas, no feature gates, and no time limits are published anywhere on the site.

The author has been unusually open about what that earns. A first-party blog post from September 2022 reported €350 in donations across 26 distinct payments for the year to that point, roughly 27 cents per active user per month. Third-party sites mention a €3 per month PayPal tier, but we could not confirm that on counter.dev itself, so we are not stating it as fact. Self-hosting is free under AGPL-3.0 via the separate counter.dev-selfhost repository.

The limits of a service funded by €350 in donations

• The feature set is the narrowest here. No events, no goals, no funnels, no replay, no heatmaps
• Funding is thin by the author's own published numbers, so plan for the service to change or stop
• Documentation and the dashboard are basic, and there is no company support to call
• No published data retention policy that we could find, which matters if you need to answer that question in an audit
• The founding year is not stated anywhere first-party, so we have left it blank rather than guess

Better than seventh place suggests, and still a hobby

We like Counter.dev more than its ranking suggests. It is the most honest tool in this category: no dark patterns, no upsell, no data harvesting, and an author who publishes his own revenue figures. It sits at seventh because it does the least, and because a hobby-scale service is a genuine risk for anything that matters commercially. Put it on your blog, pay the author what a coffee costs each month, and use something with a company behind it for your business site.