It’s been 4 months since I wrote about the analytics tool I want. My idea was to create an alternative for Google Analytics that simplifies the UI and enhances the privacy of online tracking.
After writing that initial post, I spent 2 months creating a prototype and launched the public beta for Plausible in February.
By now, more than 60 people have signed up used Plausible successfully. I’ve received encouraging feedback and many feature requests over the last two months. I appreciate everyone’s feedback as it has helped me form the roadmap for the next few months of development.
I could easily hide in my cave for more months to tackle that roadmap. But to see if Plausible has real potential, I have to introduce it to the marketplace and see if people are actually willing to pay for it.
Pricing
Coming up with the price tag for Plausible was a surprisingly difficult process. I started by asking myself: _Should Plausible have a freemium model?_After doing some research, I decided that the support and maintenance costs of running a free tier would be far too high for one person to handle. As a solo founder, I need to keep overhead low so I can keep up with both support and product development.
I’m not going to rule out a free tier or even a self-hosted version of Plausible in the future. However, I want to protect my time for now and get the product working well in the market before scaling up.
As a customer I appreciate products with very simple pricing schemes, so I wanted to keep it as straightforward as possible. There will be no premium features, accounts will be billed purely for the amount of traffic they get.
- up to 10k pageviews - $6 / mo
- up to 100k pageviews - $12 / mo
- up to 1m pageviews - $36 / mo
It was important for me to include a small (<10k) tier to suit personal websites and blogs that don’t get much traffic. I will definitely be experimenting with these plans going forward to see what works best.
Existing beta users also get a third off on all of these plans. This is my way of thanking the beta community for providing feedback and engaging with the product from an early stage.
Going forward
Plausible is still under heavy development. With the introduction of paid plans, I will be investing more into customer support and documentation as well.
The goal for the next month or so is to get payments, invoicing, and VAT handling all working smoothly. Once I have all the tools set up to run the business, I can shift focus back to product improvements.
I’m really excited about making Plausible the best web analytics tool out there. There’s a long way to go on this mission but today marks a big milestone on this journey. Check back on this blog for updates on the product and the business.
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