SAASPOCALYPSEverdict #PLAUSIBLE-C681
scanned 2026.04.27 · 14:56
subject of investigation
plausible.io
▸ privacy-friendly web analytics dashboard
verdict: MONTH
buildability score
48
/100
tier · month
the blunt take
“The dashboard is a weekend. The privacy-compliance, bot filtering, and 260 billion pageviews of reliable ingestion pipeline are absolutely not. You're not building Plausible — you're building the part that got them to paying customer #1, and then discovering why they needed 10 people for the rest.”
The hard part isn't the pretty single-page dashboard — it's the event ingestion at scale, the cookieless fingerprint-free visitor deduplication, the EU-only data residency guarantees, and the real-time updates that don't murder your database. All four show up before you hit 1,000 users.
cost breakdown.
their price ←→ your price
what they charge●
Business plan
$19
/ mo (up to 10 sites)
※ scales up with pageview volume beyond 10k/mo
annual:$228
what it costs you✦
01 · Hetzner VPS (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM for ClickHouse)$20.00
02 · ClickHouse Cloud free tier or self-host$0.00
03 · Vercel hobby (dashboard frontend)$0.00
04 · Resend (email reports)$0.00
05 · Cloudflare (script CDN + DDoS)$0.00
06 · Domain + TLS$2.00
TOTAL / mo22
▸ break-even:2 sites — $19/mo self-hosted vs $19/mo Business plan. Basically immediate if you run 3+ sites.
or, you know, use one of these.
if building feels spicy
option A
Plausible CE (self-host)
it's open source. Docker compose up. Literally just do this. The repo is public.
option B
Umami (self-host)
simpler codebase, Postgres-native, MIT licensed. Great Plausible clone energy.
option C
Cabin.dev free tier
if you want carbon-aware analytics without the build. Plausible-adjacent vibes.
what'll actually be hard.
est. total: 6 weeks
▸ 1 week tracker script + ingestion API · 1 week dashboard UI · 1 week goals/funnels/UTM parsing · 2 weeks query performance + clickhouse wrangling · 1 week auth, multi-site, email reports
easy
medium
hard
nightmare
01
easy
Single-page dashboard UI
Recharts or Chart.js, a few stat cards, one page. You'll enjoy this part.
02
easy
UTM parameter parsing & goal tracking
String parsing and a goals table. Not glamorous, totally doable.
03
medium
Cookieless visitor deduplication
You need a daily-rotating hash of IP + UA + site. Sounds easy, gets philosophically weird fast.
04
medium
Real-time updates every 30s
SSE or polling. Fine until your query is slow and your VPS fans spin up.
05
hard
Event ingestion at scale with ClickHouse
ClickHouse is fast but not obvious. Schema design, batching writes, MergeTree gotchas — plan a weekend just for this.
06
nightmare
Bot filtering that actually works
IP reputation lists, data-center CIDR ranges, referrer spam blocklists. It's a living dataset, not a one-time task.
recommended stack
Next.js 15 (dashboard + API routes)ClickHouse (event storage, MergeTree)Postgres (sites, users, goals meta)Resend (email/Slack reports)Cloudflare Workers (tracker script delivery)
ready to build?
We'll email you the build guide. Cancel some plans.
▸ generated with love, by a heartless robotverdict v2.1 · saaspocalypse.dev