Counter

Name: Counter
Brand: Counter

A one-kilobyte visitor counter, pay what you want, run by one person

Counter (counter.dev) is a minimal, open-source, AGPL-licensed web analytics service built and hosted in Germany by a single developer, showing daily unique visitors, referrers, geography, and basic device data from a tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, without cookies, IP logging, or fingerprinting, and funded by a pay-what-you-want service fee rather than a subscription price.

Visit website

Overview

Counter is the smallest serious product in this category and it is deliberate about that. Irae Hueck Costa built it as a single-developer project to answer the two questions a website owner actually asks most days, which are how many people came and where did they come from. The tracking script is around a kilobyte, the backend is a Go binary in front of Redis with regular disk backups, and the interface shows daily unique visitors, referrers, countries, browsers, and devices with nothing else competing for attention.

The privacy position is the most extreme in the group and it is architectural rather than contractual. There are no cookies, no browser storage, no fingerprinting, and, unusually, no IP address processing in the backend at all. Most privacy-first tools derive a country from the IP and then discard it; Counter avoids handling it in a way that would create personal data in the first place. The practical result is the same conclusion the whole category reaches, which is that no analytics consent banner is required, but Counter gets there with less to explain.

The commercial model is the other thing that makes it unusual: Counter does not charge. It asks users to voluntarily pay an affordable service fee whenever they are ready, and the developer has written publicly about whether pay-what-you-want can sustain a service like this. For a small business that is either a gift or a warning depending on temperament, because voluntary funding is exactly as durable as the goodwill behind it, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025.

That risk needs stating plainly, because everything else about Counter is charming. It is AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from GitHub, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service. But recent commits have been mostly copy edits rather than features, there is no SLA, no support commitment, and no company, and the feature set stops well short of events, goals, funnels, or an API worth building against. Counter is the correct choice for a personal site or a side project and the wrong one for anything a client is paying you to report on.

Best for

Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.

Not the right fit for

Any business where a client, an investor, or a board is reading the numbers; there is no SLA, no support commitment, no company behind it, and the domain has lapsed once already.
Marketing teams that need events, goals, funnels, or campaign conversion reporting; Counter counts visits and referrers and does not attempt conversion measurement at all.
Ecommerce or B2B teams needing revenue attribution or CRM joining; nothing in this product touches revenue, and Dreamdata, Attribution, or Triple Whale are the relevant categories.
Anyone who needs an API, a warehouse export, or BI connectors; there is no meaningful programmatic surface to build reporting on.
Teams that need multiple users, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards; Counter has no team model, which makes it unusable for agency reporting.

How it works

1
You add a script of roughly one kilobyte to your pages. It sets no cookies and writes nothing to browser storage, so it can fire before any consent decision and it does not require a banner for analytics purposes.
2
The backend is a static Go binary handling requests against an in-memory Redis store with regular disk backups, which is why the service can be run cheaply by one person and why it stays fast. Unique daily visitors are derived without processing or retaining an IP address in the backend, which is the most conservative approach to visitor counting anyone in this category takes.
3
The dashboard reports daily unique visitors, referrers, countries, and basic technology breakdowns. There is no report builder, no segmentation engine, and no exploration interface, because those are the things Counter has decided not to be. You read the numbers and close the tab.
4
Payment happens when you decide it should. There is no plan selection, no trial expiry, and no feature gate: the service asks for a voluntary, affordable fee and continues working either way. If you would rather not depend on that arrangement, the AGPL source on GitHub can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure.

Feature breakdown

20 features in 4 modules

Core reporting

Four numbers, presented without ceremony.

Daily unique visitors: The headline metric, counted per day without a persistent identifier, which means a visitor who returns on a later day is counted again rather than tracked across days.
Referrer reporting: Where traffic came from, which alongside the visitor count is the entire practical value proposition for a personal site or a project page.
Country and geography: Visitor location at country level, derived without retaining an IP address in the backend.
Browser and device breakdown: Basic technology reporting so you know whether your audience is mobile, and whether that Safari layout bug matters.
Multiple sites on one account: Several properties can be tracked under a single login, which suits a developer with a handful of personal projects.
No configuration: There is nothing to set up beyond installing the script: no goals to define, no filters to build, no property structure to design. The absence is the feature.

Privacy architecture

The most conservative data handling of anything in this category.

No cookies: Nothing is written to the visitor's browser, which removes the ePrivacy consent trigger for analytics entirely.
No IP processing in the backend: Counter's stated position is that IP addresses are not processed by the backend, which goes further than the common pattern of deriving a country from an IP and then discarding it.
No fingerprinting: No device or browser fingerprint is constructed to identify returning visitors, which is why the metric is daily uniques rather than persistent users.
No cross-site tracking: Visitors cannot be followed between properties, so there is no identity graph and nothing to sell, share, or leak.
No consent banner required: With no cookies, no storage, and no personal data, there is no analytics justification for a consent banner under GDPR or ePrivacy, which is the same conclusion Plausible and Fathom reach by slightly different routes.
German hosting: The service is operated from Germany, which puts it inside the EU jurisdiction most European privacy reviews prefer.

Openness and self-hosting

The insurance policy against the funding model.

AGPL-licensed source: The full codebase is public on GitHub under AGPL v3, so every privacy claim is inspectable and the software cannot be taken away from you.
Self-hostable: A Go binary and a Redis instance is a genuinely small deployment, so a technical user who wants continuity guarantees can run their own copy for the price of a tiny server.
Lightweight architecture: A static Go binary in front of an in-memory Redis store with regular disk backups, which is why the whole thing can be run by one person cheaply.
Roughly 1KB script: Among the smallest tracking tags in existence, which matters on a site where Core Web Vitals and page weight are being defended rather than merely measured.

Commercial model

Pay what you want, which is generous and unstable in equal measure.

Pay-what-you-want fee: The service does not charge; it asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee whenever the user is ready, with no feature gating on either side of that decision.
No plan tiers or trials: There is nothing to choose, nothing to expire, and no upgrade path, which removes an entire class of billing admin.
No contract or lock-in: There is no subscription to cancel and no data hostage situation, because there was never a commitment in either direction.
Single-operator service: Run by one developer with no SLA and no support organisation, which is both why it can be free and why it should not carry a business-critical reporting job.

Use cases

4 documented

Developer with a personal blog

Wants to know whether anyone read the last post and whether Hacker News or a newsletter sent them, without installing Google Analytics or adding a consent banner.

A one-kilobyte script gives daily uniques and referrers, the banner never appears, and the cost is whatever the developer decides to send when they feel like it.

Open-source maintainer with a docs site

Needs a rough sense of documentation traffic to justify effort, and the project's audience runs ad blockers at unusually high rates.

Counter's tiny first-party script is far less likely to be blocked than Google's tag, and the AGPL licence means the maintainer can self-host it on the same box as the docs if they prefer.

Freelancer with a portfolio site

Wants to know whether the portfolio gets visits and from where, with no interest in funnels, events, or reporting to anyone.

Counter answers both questions on one page and costs nothing until they choose otherwise. If the freelancer starts reporting to clients, that is the point to move to Pirsch or Simple Analytics.

Small site owner at 100,000 monthly pageviews

Traffic has grown and the owner is deciding whether to keep a free minimal tool or pay for something with goals and campaign reporting.

Counter will keep counting, but at this volume the questions change from how many to which campaigns and which pages convert, and Counter has no answer to either. This is the traffic level at which the honest recommendation is to move up to a paid tool and send Counter a thank-you payment on the way out.

Pricing

from $0 (pay what you want)

Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.

Plan	Price	Includes
Hosted (pay what you want)	$0 voluntary service fee, whenever you choose	Daily unique visitors, referrers, countries, browsers, devices Roughly 1KB cookieless script No IP processing in the backend Multiple sites under one account German hosting No plan to select and nothing to cancel; the vendor asks rather than charges, which is exactly as durable as that sounds.
Self-hosted	$0 forever, plus your own infrastructure cost	AGPL v3 source on GitHub Go binary plus Redis, small enough for a minimal VPS Full control over retention and continuity No dependency on the hosted service surviving The realistic hedge against the funding model for anyone technical enough to want the guarantee.

Plan

Price

Includes

Hosted (pay what you want)

voluntary service fee, whenever you choose

Daily unique visitors, referrers, countries, browsers, devices
Roughly 1KB cookieless script
No IP processing in the backend
Multiple sites under one account
German hosting

No plan to select and nothing to cancel; the vendor asks rather than charges, which is exactly as durable as that sounds.

Self-hosted

forever, plus your own infrastructure cost

AGPL v3 source on GitHub
Go binary plus Redis, small enough for a minimal VPS
Full control over retention and continuity
No dependency on the hosted service surviving

The realistic hedge against the funding model for anyone technical enough to want the guarantee.

Billing notes

There is no price list, no invoice cycle, and no overage; the vendor's published position is that users pay an affordable amount voluntarily when ready.
Because there is no contract, there is also no service commitment: no SLA, no uptime guarantee, and no support promise in either direction.
The domain lapsed once in 2025, which is the single most important operational fact in this entry and the reason not to put business-critical reporting on the hosted service.
Self-hosting under AGPL costs whatever a very small VPS costs and removes the continuity question entirely, at the price of running it yourself.

Value assessment: At a price of zero with an honest request attached, the value question is not really about money, it is about risk and scope. What you get is a fast, tiny, genuinely private visitor counter that answers two questions well and asks nothing of you. What you do not get is events, goals, funnels, an API, teams, or any commitment that the service will exist next year. For a personal site that is an excellent trade and the right thing to do is pay something. For a business, the six to twenty dollars a month that Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom charge buys continuity, support, and a feature set that grows with you, and that is money well spent rather than money saved.

Strengths & limitations

Strengths

The most conservative privacy architecture in this category: no cookies, no browser storage, no fingerprinting, and no IP processing in the backend at all.
A tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, which is among the smallest in existence and effectively free in page weight terms.
No consent banner required, with less to explain to a data protection officer than any competitor because there is less data being handled.
AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from a Go binary plus Redis, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service.
Free to use with a voluntary payment model, which removes billing admin entirely and is genuinely generous for personal and open-source projects.
German hosting inside the EU jurisdiction, which suits European site owners without any transfer paperwork.
Zero configuration: install the script and read the numbers, with no property structure, goals, or filters to design.

Limitations

The hosted service is run by one developer with no SLA and no support commitment, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025, which is a real continuity risk.
No events, goals, funnels, or conversion reporting at all, so it cannot answer whether a campaign produced signups.
No meaningful API, warehouse export, or BI connectors, so the data cannot feed anything else you run.
No teams, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards, which rules it out for agency use entirely.
Daily unique counting means no returning-visitor measurement, no retention analysis, and no multi-day journeys.
Recent development has been mostly copy edits rather than features, so this should be read as a stable minimal tool rather than a growing product.
No CRM, ad platform, or ecommerce integration of any kind, so revenue and attribution questions are entirely out of scope.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

Counter vs Plausible Analytics

from $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews)

Plausible is what Counter would be if it were a real business: the same cookieless philosophy and one-page simplicity, but with goals, funnels, revenue attribution, an API, team seats, a bootstrapped-profitable company, and prices from $9 a month. Counter is free and tiny. Use Counter on a personal site; move to Plausible the moment someone other than you needs to read the numbers.

Full Counter vs Plausible Analytics comparison

Counter vs Fathom Analytics

from $15/mo (up to 100,000 pageviews)

Fathom sells simplicity as a paid product, bundling unlimited sites, permanent data retention, and a company that answers support email. Counter offers a smaller script and no bill. If minimalism is your requirement, Counter delivers more of it; if minimalism plus reliability is the requirement, Fathom is the version you can put on a client site.

Full Counter vs Fathom Analytics comparison

Counter vs Simple Analytics

from $0 (free forever), then €20 per month

Simple Analytics has a free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use, five sites, events, an API, and a company behind it, which makes it strictly more capable than Counter at the same headline price of zero. The only reasons to prefer Counter are the smaller script and the preference for supporting an independent developer directly. For a business, Simple Analytics is the better free option.

Full Counter vs Simple Analytics comparison

Counter vs Pirsch Analytics

from $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews)

Pirsch is the German managed alternative at $6 to $12 a month, adding events, goals, funnels, A/B testing, white labelling, SDKs, and a REST API, with a real company and two founders behind it. Counter has none of that and costs nothing. The moment your analytics need to survive a domain renewal you did not control, Pirsch is the upgrade.

Full Counter vs Pirsch Analytics comparison

Counter vs Umami

from $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro)

Umami is the same open-source instinct taken seriously: MIT-licensed, self-hostable on Docker and Postgres, with funnels, retention, journeys, revenue, and a full API in the free build, plus a hosted free tier. Counter is smaller and simpler but ends where Umami begins. Any technical user considering self-hosting Counter should look at Umami first, because the deployment is barely harder and the product is a different league.

Full Counter vs Umami comparison

Implementation & onboarding

Setup time: Under five minutes. Create an account, paste a one-kilobyte script, and the numbers start appearing. There is nothing else to configure.
Learning curve: None. The dashboard has four sections and no report builder, which is the entire design intent.
Onboarding: Entirely self-serve with no sales process, no trial clock, and no plan selection. Self-hosting requires reading a GitHub README and running a Go binary against Redis.
Migration notes: There is no Google Analytics importer and no historical migration path, so switching means starting from zero. Leaving is equally simple because there is very little data to take with you. Anyone worried about the hosted service's continuity should either self-host from the start or treat Counter as a stepping stone toward a paid tool.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web app (German-hosted)Self-hosted (Go binary plus Redis)JavaScript tracking script
API: No substantial public API; the product is a dashboard rather than a data platform, and self-hosted users query their own Redis store if they need programmatic access.
Compliance: GDPRePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required)
Data residency: Hosted in Germany; entirely under your control if self-hosted.
SSO: None.
Security notes: AGPL v3 source on GitHub makes every data-handling claim verifiable. No cookies, no browser storage, no fingerprinting, and no IP processing in the backend means there is very little personal data in the system to secure. There is no SLA, no formal support channel, and no security attestation, which is the appropriate expectation for a single-developer service.

Support & resources

Channels: GitHub issuesEmail to the developer
Documentation: Minimal, matching the product; the GitHub repository and the site itself are the documentation.
Community: Small; the GitHub repository at github.com/ihucos/counter.dev is the main community surface, alongside occasional posts on the project blog.

Company

Founded: 2020
Headquarters: Germany
Ownership: Independent single-developer project, funded by voluntary user payments
Founders: Irae Hueck Costa
Employees: One
Funding: None; no outside investment, sustained by a pay-what-you-want service fee.

Timeline

2020Irae Hueck Costa releases Counter as an open-source, AGPL-licensed minimal analytics service built on a Go binary and Redis.
2022The project publishes its reasoning on whether a pay-what-you-want model can sustain a hosted analytics service.
2023Universal Analytics shuts down and interest in minimal cookieless alternatives grows across the independent web.
2025The counter.dev domain lapses once before being restored, which remains the clearest illustration of the continuity risk in a single-operator service.
2026The project continues as a stable minimal tool, with recent commits largely copy edits rather than new features.

Integrations

Any website via the JavaScript tracking script
Self-hosted deployment from the GitHub repository
No CRM, ad platform, ecommerce, or BI integrations by design

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is Counter (counter.dev)?

Counter is a minimal, open-source, AGPL-licensed web analytics service built and hosted in Germany by a single developer, Irae Hueck Costa. It shows daily unique visitors, referrers, countries, and basic device data from a script of roughly one kilobyte, with no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no IP processing in the backend.

How much does Counter cost?

Nothing, unless you decide otherwise. It runs on a pay-what-you-want model: the service does not charge, and instead asks users to send a voluntary, affordable service fee when they are ready. There are no tiers, no trials, and no feature gates on either side of that decision. The AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.

Do I need a cookie consent banner with Counter?

No. Counter sets no cookies, writes nothing to browser storage, does no fingerprinting, and states that IP addresses are not processed by the backend, so none of the GDPR or ePrivacy triggers for an analytics consent banner are met. Anything else on your site that sets cookies may still require one independently.

Is Counter safe to use for a business?

For a business, be careful. There is no SLA, no support organisation, no company, and the domain lapsed once in 2025 before being restored. Nothing about the software is bad, but a single-operator free service should not carry reporting that a client, an investor, or a board depends on. Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, and Fathom cost six to twenty dollars a month and buy you continuity.

Does Counter track events, goals, or conversions?

No. It counts daily unique visitors and reports referrers, countries, and basic technology data, and that is the whole product. If you need to know whether a campaign produced signups, whether a funnel leaks, or which page converts, Counter cannot answer and you need a tool with events and goals.

Can I self-host Counter?

Yes. The source is AGPL v3 on GitHub and the architecture is a static Go binary in front of Redis with disk backups, which is a very small deployment. Self-hosting is the sensible hedge if you like the tool but not the continuity risk. If you are technical enough to consider this, look at Umami first, because the deployment is barely harder and the feature set is far deeper.

How does Counter compare to Plausible, Fathom, or Simple Analytics?

Those are businesses with goals, funnels, APIs, team seats, and support, priced between free and about twenty dollars a month. Counter is a smaller, stricter, unfunded tool that stops at visitor counts and referrers. Simple Analytics in particular has a free forever plan that is strictly more capable, so Counter's edge is really the tiny script, the German single-operator ethos, and the direct support relationship.

Why does Counter count daily unique visitors rather than users?

Because it does not store a persistent identifier for anyone. Without a cookie, a fingerprint, or a retained IP, there is no way to recognise the same person on a later day, so the honest metric is uniques per day. That means no returning-visitor reporting, no retention analysis, and no multi-day journeys, which is the deliberate cost of the privacy design.

Is Counter still actively developed?

It is maintained rather than actively growing. Recent commits have been largely copy edits rather than new features, which is consistent with a small stable tool that has reached the scope its author intended. Treat it as finished software, not as a product with a roadmap.

Who runs Counter and how is it funded?

It is a single-developer project by Irae Hueck Costa, operated from Germany and funded entirely by voluntary payments from users. There is no company, no investors, and no revenue commitment, which is why the service can be free and also why its future depends on continued goodwill from the people using it.

Editorial verdict

Counter is the most likeable product in this category and the one you should be most careful about depending on. The privacy engineering is genuinely the strictest here, refusing even to process IP addresses in the backend, the script is a kilobyte, no consent banner is needed, and the whole thing is free with a polite request attached. For a personal blog, an open-source docs site, or a portfolio, it is the right tool and you should pay the developer something. For anything commercial, the absence of events, goals, an API, teams, and any service commitment is disqualifying, and the fact that the domain lapsed once in 2025 is not a detail to gloss over. If you like the philosophy but need reliability, Simple Analytics is free and more capable, Pirsch is six dollars and far deeper, and Umami is the open-source version to self-host instead.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.