Indie analytics tools that don't sell your data (and which one to pick)

The first thing to understand about Google Analytics is that it's not free. The price is the data your visitors generate flowing into Google's broader advertising graph — used to target ads against them across the rest of the web, on YouTube, on Search, and in any property Google owns or partners with. You don't pay because Google has already monetised the people who visit your site.

That trade was acceptable when GA was the only credible analytics option. In 2026 it isn't, and the indie privacy-first tools have caught up to the point where there's no remaining technical reason to keep using GA4 on most sites. The remaining reasons are inertia and the BigQuery export.

Why GA4 is the wrong default in 2026

A few things changed at once. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection broke open-rate tracking. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention broke cross-site cookies. The GDPR enforcement wave (especially in France, Austria, and Italy) made GA4 use functionally non-compliant for many EU companies without significant configuration. And GA4 itself shipped a data model so different from Universal Analytics that anyone returning to the dashboard after a year off had to relearn how to ask basic questions.

Meanwhile, the indie analytics tools — Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch — got better. They handle the 10 metrics most teams actually look at (visitors, pageviews, sources, top pages, conversions) on a single page, with no cookie banner required, hosted in jurisdictions you can actually point to, on pricing that maps to your traffic rather than your willingness to learn a tag manager.

Picking between Plausible, Fathom, and the rest

These tools all look similar from the outside. The differences that matter:

Plausible. Bootstrapped, EU-hosted, open-source (AGPL), and the indie analytics tool with the largest mind-share in 2026. Pricing starts at $9/mo for 10k pageviews. The dashboard is genuinely one-page. The self-hosted option works but you're on the hook for upkeep. Choose this if you want the default-best indie pick and don't have a specific reason to look elsewhere.

Fathom Analytics. Bootstrapped, Canadian + US hosted, closed-source. Pricing starts at $15/mo for 100k pageviews — which works out better than Plausible if you have multiple sites or higher volume. The email reports are excellent and the multi-site bundle pricing is the best in the category. Choose this if you're an agency, freelancer, or running 5+ sites under one bill.

Pirsch. German indie team, EU-hosted, source-available. Smaller and quieter than the other two. Excellent if you specifically need EU-hosted-only and want to support a smaller player.

Simple Analytics. Dutch indie team, EU-hosted, the simplest of the four. If Plausible already feels too cluttered for you (it doesn't for most people), this is the lighter option.

PostHog. Different category. PostHog is open-source product analytics — funnels, retention cohorts, session replay, feature flags. If you find yourself reaching for Mixpanel-style behavioural questions, you don't need a Plausible alternative, you need PostHog. The free tier handles 1M events/month, which covers most startups indefinitely.

When you should NOT migrate off GA4

A handful of legitimate cases:

• You run Google Ads at meaningful spend. The GA4 ↔ Google Ads conversion-tracking integration is real. You'd lose conversion data quality and bid optimisation.
• You use the BigQuery export at scale. GA4 → BigQuery free up to 1M events/day is genuinely valuable if you have a data team that uses it.
• You're a compliance-checkbox shop. The privacy-first tools are better for actual privacy but if "we use Google Analytics" is the answer to a SOC 2 reviewer's question, you may not care about the upside.

For everyone else: migrate. The work is one afternoon. The cookie banner goes away. The dashboard becomes usable again.

A migration plan that actually works

The mistake teams make is running both tools in parallel forever. Don't. Pick the indie tool, install it, give yourself a week of overlap, and remove GA4. You're not going to look at the GA4 dashboard ever again — keeping it running just means more JavaScript on every page and one more cookie banner item to disclose.

The right sequence:

1. Install Plausible (or whichever you picked) — single script tag.
2. Configure goals/events for the 3–5 conversions you actually care about. Don't try to recreate everything you tracked in GA4. You weren't using it.
3. Let it run for 7 days alongside GA4. Compare numbers — they'll be within 5%.
4. Remove GA4. Remove the cookie banner clause. Update your privacy policy.

That's the migration. The hardest part is convincing yourself you don't need to keep GA4 "just in case."

The TL;DR

GA4 is free because Google has monetised the trade. The indie privacy-first analytics tools have caught up technically and offer a materially better daily experience. Plausible is the right default; Fathom is the right answer for multi-site setups; PostHog is the right answer if you actually need product analytics. Migrate this quarter and never look back.