Why I built sub.analytics instead of just using Google Analytics

Every time I started a new project, the setup routine was the same: create repo, configure deployment, add Google Analytics. It was automatic. It’s what you do. GA is free, it’s everywhere, and it answers the most important early question — is anyone actually using this?

Then one day I stopped and thought about what “free” actually means here. Google Analytics is free because the data is the product. Every pageview I send to GA is a data point Google collects about my users — their device, their location, their browsing habits — added to a profile that serves Google’s advertising business. I’m not just using a tool. I’m opening a door into my users’ behavior and handing the key to one of the largest ad networks on the planet.

That felt wrong. Especially when I was building products for people who trusted me with their time and attention.

But analytics genuinely matter

I want to be clear about something: dropping analytics entirely is not the answer. Knowing whether your work is reaching people is not vanity — it’s feedback. Without it, you’re building blind. You don’t know if a new feature drove more signups or killed them. You don’t know which blog post brought in your best users. You don’t know if the site even loads correctly in half the countries you care about.

Analytics is how you find out if something is working. That information is genuinely valuable, and pretending you don’t need it doesn’t make you more ethical — it just makes you less informed.

The gap in the market

So I looked for alternatives. The privacy-first analytics space exists — Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics are all solid products. But they start at $9–19 per month per site. That’s reasonable if you’re running one established product. It’s a real number when you’re running four side projects, two client sites, and an experiment you’re not even sure will survive the month.

In practice, the choice most developers make is: pay nothing and use Google, or pay $15/mo per site and use a privacy-respecting alternative. Neither option is great. The first compromises your users. The second quickly becomes expensive enough that you skip it for smaller projects — and those projects go unmonitored.

So I built a third option

sub.analytics exists because I wanted something I could put on every project without guilt and without budget anxiety. Cookie-free, so there’s no consent banner. No data sent to third parties. No advertising business model. Just the numbers you actually need: pageviews, referrers, top pages, visitor trends.

At $5/mo, the math changes. It’s the cost of a coffee, and it covers everything — all your sites, all your projects, no per-site fees. You stop rationing analytics to your “serious” projects and start using it everywhere, which is when it actually becomes useful.

The version I wished existed

I didn’t set out to build an analytics company. I set out to solve my own frustration: needing a simple, honest, affordable way to understand whether my work was reaching people — without making my users’ data someone else’s business model. sub.analytics is that tool, and it turns out I’m not the only one who needed it.

If this sounds like the analytics setup you’ve been looking for, the 30-day free trial requires no credit card.