GoatCounter is free on a promise nobody has put a number on

63 sits mid-table in our Usable band, and two very different pillars produce it. Freedom scores 84: no card, no cookies and therefore no consent banner, no branding, no upsell, and an EUPL-1.2 codebase that self-hosts in about ten minutes.

Feature depth scores 42, which is the floor of this category, and that is a description rather than a criticism. GoatCounter does the smallest version of the traffic-counting job on purpose. There are no events, goals or funnels, which Umami's free plan includes for nothing, and no replay or heatmaps, which Microsoft Clarity's free plan includes for nothing. Generosity at 72 rewards an unlimited self-hosted route while withholding credit for a hosted cap that has never been written down.

The hosted limits are the problem, and the problem is that nobody can quote them (as of July 2026):

• The cap is "reasonable public usage", aimed at personal sites and small to medium businesses, with the note that sending millions of pageviews a day is not reasonable.
• No numeric threshold exists first-party. goatcounter.com/help/pricing returns a 404, and we are not repeating figures from third parties that disagree with each other.
• There is no commercial price on file either, so if your site is large or clearly commercial, ask the author directly rather than assuming you are inside the terms.

The feature limits are firmer and easier to plan around. You get pageviews over time, top pages, referrers, campaigns, countries, browsers, systems and screen sizes. There are no events, goals, funnels, cohorts, A/B tests, session replays or heatmaps, and the author does not intend to add them. That narrowness is the product.

One more thing to weigh honestly: this is a one-person project funded by GitHub Sponsors donations and NLnet NGI0 funding. That is more transparent than a venture-backed company and also more fragile, and it is a durability question rather than a quality one.

Self-hosting removes every ambiguity above. A single Go binary or Docker image, SQLite or PostgreSQL, EUPL-1.2 licensed, with the count.js tracking script under ISC separately.

There is no ladder to describe, which is unusual enough to say outright. GoatCounter's hosted service is offered free, funded by donations, and the page that would define a commercial tier is a dead link. That is a documentation gap rather than a business model, and we hit it while writing this rather than reading about it.

What that means practically is that your upgrade path is not money, it is your own server. Self-hosting GoatCounter is the easiest install in this category: one Go binary, an official Docker image, and SQLite if you do not want to run a database server at all. A small VPS handles it comfortably, and there is nothing to license and nothing to renew.

So the two real options are a free hosted account on terms you cannot plan around, or a self-hosted instance on terms written into a license. For a personal blog the first is fine and the author deserves a few dollars a month for it. For anything commercial the second is the only version we would build on, and it costs the same as the smallest VPS you can rent.

If you want a hosted tool with terms you can read, Umami's free plan is the closest neighbour, though its own Cloud allowance is unpublished too.

Yes, within limits, and the awkward part is that the limits are undefined rather than large. The hosted service genuinely costs nothing and asks for no card. What it cannot give you is a number to plan against, and "reasonable public usage" is not something you build a business on.

Who this suits: personal sites, blogs and documentation where you want a visitor count and nothing else; developers who want an analytics binary they can install and forget; anyone who found Plausible and Umami to be more tool than they needed. On that use it is the least demanding option in the category, and self-hosting it is a ten-minute job.

Who it does not: any commercial site with growth plans, because the hosted terms are too loose to rely on and the feature ceiling is low by design. If you need events or goals, this is the wrong tool at any price, not just the free one.

Free GoatCounter alternatives lists tools with published limits, Counter.dev's free plan is the other end of the same philosophy, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.