GoatCounter review

One person, one binary, and no funnel builder

GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, and it is the smallest tool on this list by some distance. The dashboard shows pageviews over time, top pages, referrers, campaigns, countries, browsers, systems, and screen sizes. That is the whole product. There is no funnel builder, no replay, no cohort analysis, and the author has no intention of adding them.

The funding model is worth understanding because it explains the tool. The hosted service is free for what the site calls "reasonable public usage", supported by GitHub Sponsors donations and NLnet NGI0 funding. The author has written that he would prefer to make it free for everyone up to some pageview threshold, like Google Analytics does, but that he needs to pay the bills. It is a fragile arrangement compared with a venture-backed company, and also a more transparent one.

For a blog, a docs site, or a dev who wants less

• Personal sites, blogs, and documentation where you just want a visitor count
• Developers who want a self-hosted analytics binary they can forget about
• People who found Plausible and Umami to be more tool than they needed
• Anyone who wants to support small independent software rather than a platform

Free for reasonable public usage, with no price we could verify

GoatCounter's own words are that the hosted service "is currently offered for free for 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.

We tried to pin down the numbers and could not. The pricing help page returns a 404 as of 20 July 2026, and no other first-party page publishes a pageview cap or a commercial plan price. Third-party reviews cite figures that contradict each other, so we are not repeating any of them. If your site is large or clearly commercial, ask the author directly rather than assuming.

Self-hosting is unambiguous: a single Go binary or Docker image, SQLite or PostgreSQL, EUPL-1.2 licensed with a lightly modified compatible-licenses appendix. The count.js tracking script is ISC licensed separately.

No funnels, no replay, and limits nobody published

• The free hosted terms are vague. "Reasonable public usage" is not something you can plan a business around
• No funnels, no replay, no heatmaps, no event-based product analytics
• It is a solo project. That is charming until you need support or the author moves on
• The interface is plain to the point of austere, which is fine until you need to show it to a client
• Documentation gaps are real, including the dead pricing page we hit while writing this

Use it on a blog, and send the author a few dollars

If all you want is a number next to "how many people read my blog this month", GoatCounter is the least demanding way to get it, and self-hosting it is genuinely a ten-minute job. Do not pick it for a commercial site with growth plans, because the hosted terms are too loosely defined to rely on and the feature ceiling is low by design. For a personal site, we would use it happily and send the author a few dollars a month.