Plausible Analytics is the textbook procurement-friendly Google Analytics alternative: an Estonian-incorporated, bootstrapped, profitable team-of-ten that runs the entire product on European infrastructure and publishes a clean, public DPA. The legal entity is Plausible Insights OÜ in Tartu, Estonia. Uku Taht launched the project in December 2018 and Marko Saric joined as co-founder in 2020. The company is self-funded, has more than 17,000 paying subscribers, and explicitly rejects outside investment, keeping the cap table firmly EU-owned.
The product is a lightweight, cookieless analytics script (~1 KB, ~54× smaller than GA4) that does not use persistent identifiers; daily salts are rotated and deleted, raw IPs and User-Agents are never stored, and no cookie banner is required for visitor analytics. Customer analytics data is "kept fully secured, encrypted and hosted on 100% renewable-energy-powered servers in Falkenstein, Germany"; Hetzner is the named hosting provider. Other product sub-processors are EU-only as well: Bunny CDN (Slovenia) and UpCloud (Finland). The small set of non-EU sub-processors is scoped to ancillary functions and covered by Standard Contractual Clauses: Paddle for billing (UK), Postmark for transactional email (US), and Algolia for documentation search (US, added May 2026). Optional integrations (Google, Help Scout) only engage if a customer turns them on.
Pricing starts at €8/month (billed in USD at $9) for the Starter plan with 10k pageviews and three years of data retention; a 30-day free trial requires no credit card. Plausible is also fully open source (AGPL on GitHub) and self-hostable, making it a credible answer for buyers who want the option to escape SaaS entirely. Best fit: privacy-first websites, EU agencies, regulated SMBs, and open-source-friendly engineering teams replacing GA4, and the strongest baseline reference point on this directory for how a "no CLOUD Act drama" web analytics stack actually looks.