Plausible is free on your own server. The hosted version is a 30-day trial

64 sits in our Usable band, and the number is doing something unusual: it is averaging an uncapped free build against a hosted product with no free tier at all. Generosity scores 52 for exactly that reason. If you are only ever going to self-host, read the score as considerably higher than it looks, because on that route nothing counts down.

Freedom at 84 is the pillar that matters most here. Self-hosted, your data sits on your server under AGPL-3.0 with no quota anyone can switch off, and no cookies means no consent banner for your visitors. Feature depth at 76 covers the privacy-first traffic-counting job completely, including the funnels and ecommerce revenue metrics that cost $19 a month on Cloud. What it deliberately does not do is session replay or heatmaps, so it answers how many and from where, never why they left.

Self-hosted Community Edition has no pageview cap, no site cap and no feature gates. The constraint is the deployment (as of July 2026):

• PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. This is a two-database install, heavier than Umami's single Postgres. There is an official Docker compose setup, so it is roughly a half-hour job for someone who has deployed containers and an afternoon of frustration for someone who has not.
• Upgrades and ClickHouse disk usage are yours. ClickHouse is not a database most small teams have run before, and its storage growth is the thing to watch.
• No session replay, no heatmaps, by design and at any price.

On the hosted side, the limits are simply that free does not exist:

• 30 days, no card, then you pick a tier or you stop. The trial runs on full Business-plan features, which is honest but also means the version you tried is not the version $9 buys.
• Funnels and ecommerce revenue metrics are gated to Business at $19.
• Pricing above 10,000 monthly pageviews is not published in a table, so budgeting for a busier site means using Plausible's calculator.

One thing to Plausible's credit and worth stating rather than glossing: it says all of this on its own pricing page instead of dressing a trial up as a free tier.

Cloud pricing at the entry 10,000-pageview tier, billed annually: Starter $9 for one site, Growth $14 for three sites and three team members, Business $19 adding funnels, ecommerce revenue metrics and five-year retention across ten sites and ten members. Monthly billing costs about a sixth more, so $14, $20 and $27. Every one of those figures rises with your traffic tier.

Read the ladder as a rental agreement rather than a freemium ramp. What you buy at $9 is somebody else running the two databases, keeping ClickHouse healthy and taking the backups, which is a fair price for that work and roughly nothing like what the free tools in this category charge. The gap between Starter and Business is the analysis features rather than volume, so the tier you need is decided by whether you track conversions and revenue, not by how busy your site is.

The self-hosted route costs a small VPS plus your own time, and time is the real number. If you already run Docker for something else, this rounds to nothing. If you do not, buy the Cloud plan, because a half-configured ClickHouse is a worse outcome than $9 a month.

The single thing people upgrade for on Cloud is funnels, and it is the $19 tier.

Yes, within limits, and the limit is not a quota, it is a precondition. Self-host the Community Edition and Plausible is completely free with no pageview cap and no feature gates, which is a real answer rather than a technicality. Use Plausible Cloud and you are on a paid product with a trial, and we will not describe that as a free plan.

Who lives free: a developer who already runs containers, a team with a sysadmin, an EU organisation that wants the data on its own infrastructure and out of anyone else's hands. For them this is arguably the best-designed open-source analytics tool there is, and we would pick it over Umami on looks alone.

Who cannot: anyone who came here specifically to stop paying and does not want to run a two-database deployment. That is most people, and the honest advice is to look at Umami's free plan first, which has both a free hosted tier and a lighter self-host, or PostHog's free plan if you want depth. Come back to Plausible when the budget exists or the Docker skills do.

Free Plausible alternatives lists the options, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.