Google Analytics --> Matomo

Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.

If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.

[0]https://matomo.org/pricing/

Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)

I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.

In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.

All the good parts of web analytics doesn't amount to much anyway. Especially if you desire to have a usable site, which includes no cookie popups.

Umami isn't half bad self hosted. Been using it with Docker Compose for a few years now on a LEB and it's working great.

Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/

Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.

i.e. you can't give stuff away for free if you aren't one of the 3 largest companies on the planet