Hosting my own analytics

I've used Plausible for my analytics since 2021, and I've been quite happy with it. It just works, it's pretty good from a privacy angle, and it gives me a nice UI for showing essential metrics without being overwhelming. I'm currently paying $12/month for it, which I think is fair enough, and seems to be a grandfathered deal, because looking at their current pricing page, I'd pay $29/month if I signed up now.

That said, I'm always interested in cutting costs when I can, and for reasons that will make sense soon, I've been using Railway to host some things, and I wondered what it would look like to host my analytics there. They have a one-click install for Plausible that you can get going in no time, so I gave that a shot. It was super simple to get going, and within minutes I had 5 sites reporting their analytics to my hosted version of Plausible (shout out to Claude Code for making the changes and pushing the updates for me in no time).

One quick tip for those using this method on Railway in the future, the install will have ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v2 as the "source image" which is an older version of Plausible. Just go into the settings of that deployment and change the source to ghcr.io/plausible/community-edition:v3.2, redepoly, and the new version will be there.

For those who don't know, Railway bills based on usage, so the more CPU/memory/bandwidth your deployed apps use, the more they cost. I noticed pretty quickly that the cost was ticking up faster than I expected. Here's what I see after 3 full days running Plausible:

I started mid-month, so the estimated usage only goes to the end of February, but running this for a full month is going to run me about $9-10. That's a bit cheaper than the official version, but it's not that much different. Spinning these up is trivial, so I also wanted to run Umami, which I'd heard was lighter and of similar quality. When I'm paying based on server load, suddenly lighter sounds better!

So I used Railway's one-click Umami install, got it running, and once again used Claude Code to quickly add the tracking code to each of the 5 sites I track. Over the exact same time period, here's what billing has accrued for this deployment.

That's much better! Now we're looking at $2 or so per month, which is pretty darn good. I'm going to let them both run for another couple days to make sure nothing unexpected changes, but if these rates hold, I've got my new analytics platform and it's going to save me about $10 per month (or $27 per month if my grandfathered price ever ended), so that's pretty rad.

In case anyone was unfamiliar with these platforms, here's what the today view for Plausible looks like:

And here's the same page for Umami:

It's a matter of taste, but I think they're both quite good, and a hell of a lot better for my needs that Google Analytics. That said, if there is some other open source analytics tool I could be using, let me know!