We just moved radubalas.com over to Vercel, and one of the first boxes to tick was analytics. I did not want a cookie banner, I did not want to feed another marketing dashboard I would never open, and I definitely did not want to pay for numbers a small site does not generate yet. So I did the homework: Vercel Web Analytics, Plausible, and Umami, side by side, with the actual limits and prices in front of me instead of the sales pages. Here is what I found and what we picked, which is the same advice I would give any small business owner who just wants to know how many people visited.
What are these three tools, in plain terms?
All three answer the same basic question: how many people came to your site, from where, and which pages they read. None of them are Google Analytics, and that is the point. They are privacy-first, lightweight, and they do not drown you in reports you will never use. The difference is who runs the thing and how you pay for it.
- Vercel Web Analytics is baked into the platform. If you already host on Vercel, it is a toggle in the dashboard plus one small snippet.
- Plausible is a hosted service you pay for monthly. Someone else runs the servers, you just add the script.
- Umami is open source. You run it yourself on your own database, which means no monthly bill but real maintenance.
What do you actually get with Vercel Web Analytics for free?
This is the one we picked, so let me be specific. On the Hobby plan you get 50,000 events a month for free, where one event is basically one page view. That is plenty for a site that just launched. There are no cookies, so you do not need a consent banner, which for a small business site removes an entire headache. Unlimited projects are included too.
The catch, and every tool has one, is the limits. On Hobby the reporting window is one month, so you cannot line up this month against last month. There are no custom events, meaning you cannot count a form submission as a tracked event. And there is no breakdown by UTM parameter unless you go Pro and add the Web Analytics Plus package for 10 USD a month. If you blow past 50,000 events, collection keeps running for a three day grace period and then stops. Nothing gets billed to you by surprise. On Pro you pay 0.03 USD per 1,000 events and the reporting window opens up to 12 months. All of this is straight from the official Vercel pricing docs.
Where does Plausible fit in?
Plausible is the paid middle ground. The cloud version is 9 USD a month, the script is about 1.8 kB so it barely touches your load time, and it is GDPR-compliant without cookies just like Vercel. What you get for the money is the stuff Vercel keeps behind Pro: funnels and goals out of the box, and a longer, more comparable view of your history. If you are not on Vercel, or you want proper goal tracking without stitching together add-ons, Plausible is the sane choice and I would not argue with anyone who picks it. The privacy-first comparisons back this up if you want to read further, for example this rundown and this 2026 side by side.
Is self-hosting Umami worth it?
Umami is open source under the MIT licence, and you self-host it on your own Postgres database. The script is around 2 kB and, crucially, it is served from your own domain. That last part is a genuine advantage: because the script is first-party, ad-blockers do not eat it the way they quietly block third-party analytics, so your numbers are more complete. Event tracking and custom reports are included, no upsell. The cost is not zero though, it is infrastructure plus your time keeping it alive. Umami publishes its own comparison with Plausible if you want the vendor view. For a business that already runs its own hosting, this is dogfooding your own stack. For everyone else, it is a maintenance job you are signing up for.
How do the three compare at a glance?
| Option | Cost | Cookies / consent | Script | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Web Analytics | Free to 50,000 events/mo, then 0.03 USD per 1,000 | No cookies, no banner | Built in | Sites already hosted on Vercel |
| Plausible Cloud | 9 USD/month | No cookies, GDPR-compliant | ~1.8 kB | Not on Vercel, want funnels and goals |
| Umami (self-hosted) | Infrastructure plus maintenance | No cookies, first-party | ~2 kB | Teams that run their own hosting |
What did we actually pick for radubalas.com?
Vercel Web Analytics. We host on Vercel, it took under an hour, it cost nothing, and it carried zero risk to the live site. That is the whole verdict for most small business sites: if you are on Vercel, start there and stop overthinking it. You do not need funnels and cohort analysis on a site that launched last week. You need to know people are arriving, which pages they read, and where they came from, and the free tier does all of that.
Then write down the two triggers that tell you it is time to move. One, you consistently pass roughly 50,000 views a month. Two, you need to look back more than 30 days to compare periods. When either of those becomes real, you choose between staying on Vercel Pro at 0.03 USD per 1,000 events with a 12-month window, or standing up Umami on your own hosting. Not before. And the missing custom events on Hobby is not the blocker it looks like: if you build a small CRM behind your contact form, you count form submissions there anyway, which is exactly what we walk through in the companion piece on Supabase vs Airtable vs Google Sheets going out the same day.
So is anyone overselling here?
Yes, and it is worth saying out loud. Analytics vendors are very good at making you feel like you are flying blind without their premium tier. For most small sites you are not. The free option genuinely covers what you need for months, sometimes years. The same instinct that makes people over-buy analytics is the one that makes them over-engineer everything else, and I have written before about keeping the basics solid instead, both in how SEO actually works in 2025 and in what the Cloudflare outage taught CEOs about their infrastructure. Pick the free, boring, correct option, ship it, and spend the energy you saved on the work that actually moves the needle. If you want a hand setting any of this up, that is literally part of what we do, and you can get in touch here.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a cookie consent banner with any of these tools?
No. All three are designed to work without cookies. Vercel Web Analytics, Plausible, and self-hosted Umami all collect visitor data without setting cookies, which means you are not obligated to show a consent banner for them. That alone is a big reason small business sites reach for these instead of Google Analytics.
What happens if I go over Vercel's free 50,000 events?
Collection keeps running for a three day grace period, then stops. Nothing gets billed to you automatically on the Hobby plan. If you want to keep collecting past the limit, you move to Pro, which charges 0.03 USD per 1,000 events and gives you a 12-month reporting window instead of one month.
Is Umami really free if it is open source?
The software is free under the MIT licence, but running it is not truly free. You host it on your own Postgres database, so the real cost is infrastructure plus the time you spend maintaining and updating it. For a team that already runs its own hosting it makes sense. For everyone else, a hosted option saves more than it costs.
We are not on Vercel. Which one should we use?
Plausible. At 9 USD a month it is the sane paid middle ground: no cookies, a tiny 1.8 kB script, funnels and goals included, and someone else handles the servers. Only go the Umami route instead if you already run your own hosting and are comfortable maintaining it. Otherwise the 9 USD buys back a lot of hassle.
Founder & CEO of RB Creative Digital. Nearly two decades in SEO and digital marketing for mortgage, aviation and AI-first companies, with clients in the UK, US and Romania. His work has been featured on Forbes, Entrepreneur and HuffPost.
LinkedIn · All articles by Radu
Edited and designed by Marius Stefan · Reviewed by Cristina Gabriela
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We just did this homework for our own site, and we do it for clients too. If you want analytics, a contact form, and hosting that just work, without the banner and without the upsell, tell us what you are running and we will point you at the right option.
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