Building an analytics tool that doesn't track visitors

In 2018, Dutch developer Adriaan van Rossum felt uneasy while installing analytics on a client's website. Website owners wanted to know which pages were popular and where visitors came from. But installing Google Analytics, which collects visitor information, to answer those questions did not sit well with him. He decided to build a product that would provide the statistics needed to run a website without tracking individual visitors.

Simple Analytics brought page views, referral sources, screen sizes, and similar information together in a simple interface. It did not use cookies to identify visitors, and it did not store IP addresses even in server logs. It also made the collection script that runs in the browser public, so people could inspect what information was sent. Its promise to customers was that they could easily see the statistics they needed while collecting less personal data from visitors.

Adriaan had built several websites before, but he repeatedly lost momentum while choosing and replacing development tools. This time, he focused on finishing a working product with familiar technology. He used Node.js without a separate framework on the server, wrote SQL directly for PostgreSQL, and deployed to a virtual server he had worked with many times. By not spending time learning new technology, he had room to work on getting the word out about the product.

He also changed his approach to launching. Previously, he had shown completed websites to friends and waited for search traffic. By participating in the creator community WIP, he learned how to prepare for a launch. He chose Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit as public channels, and friends helped him put together an introduction video and website design. A designer finished the site's design in less than two days, and Adriaan launched before polishing every small detail.

Simple Analytics launched on Product Hunt on September 19, 2018, and placed in the top three that day. It also stayed on the Hacker News front page for a day, spending about nine hours of that time at number one. On October 11, less than a month after launch, Adriaan reported monthly recurring revenue of about $300. He had won his first customers willing to pay for privacy and simplicity in a market where free analytics tools existed.

He made the business's numbers public as well. From the beginning, anyone could check its monthly recurring revenue, and in October 2019 he added monthly reports covering revenue and costs. People could see not only the product's growth but also what it cost to run. The ongoing public account of a developer building a small analytics tool became content in its own right.

By around 2022, Simple Analytics had grown into a business generating roughly $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Adriaan had developed the product alone up to that point, but he had not spent enough time acquiring more customers. He then met Iron Brands at a developer meetup. Brands, who had gained sales experience at the internship recruitment service Fiks, contacted Adriaan a few weeks later and asked whether he needed a marketing partner.

The two did not immediately enter into a business partnership. Brands first worked one day a week for three months without pay to show what he could contribute to the business. He later joined as a co-owner, creating a division of labor in which Adriaan focused on the product and technology while Brands focused on marketing and customer acquisition. Adding sales expertise to an already revenue-generating product changed how the company operated.

The reasons customers chose the product broadened too. At first, it mainly attracted developers and users concerned about privacy, but its ease of use resonated with a wider customer base. The company said this response became especially noticeable after the transition to Google Analytics 4 in 2023. For website owners who did not want to spend time learning a complex analytics interface, the promise of seeing the statistics they needed right away began to resonate.

In June 2024, the two decided to introduce a free plan. Monthly recurring revenue reported at the time was about $32,000, and they already had a business supported by subscriptions. Brands focused on the differences between customer groups. Developers running personal projects used inexpensive plans but actively recommended the product, while business customers paid higher fees.

Some developers tried Simple Analytics on personal projects and then recommended it to the companies they worked for. The two believed that lowering the barrier to free use would lead to more such referrals. Alongside the path from free user to paying customer, they also hoped free users would bring in other paying customers. They began an experiment to expand referrals that were already happening, accepting the risk of lost revenue if existing customers switched to the free plan.

The free and paid plans were divided according to practical needs. Under the published pricing, free users can view statistics for the most recent 30 days; keeping data longer requires a paid plan. In 2024, the company also introduced pricing that varies with usage. Smaller websites could start with a lower cost, while the structure was adjusted to earn revenue in proportion to the scale of customers processing more data.

Monthly recurring revenue reported at the end of 2024 was about $35,500, up 36% from the previous year. There were 1,330 paying customers, and total users exceeded 10,000. The two founders still formed the company's core, but they began assigning search optimization, a privacy newsletter, and some general work to outside contributors. They expanded the scope of operations by separating work the founders had to do themselves from work others could handle.

They did not reach that year's goal of $40,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Changing marketing emails, improving the website, or integrating external services ultimately required Adriaan to implement the changes. Because he was focused on scaling the servers and developing a new billing system, some of the work Brands had prepared never made it into the live service. In a company run by two people, the developer's time became a shared bottleneck across several areas.

In 2025, they expanded the places where they could meet customers. Having grown through search traffic but sensing its limits, they pursued integrations with other platforms and made it possible to add Simple Analytics directly through the website deployment platform Netlify. In a report on June 2025 results, Brands said nearly 10% of new signups came through that integration. Signups from this one platform integration outnumbered those gained through social media activity.

They offered business customers a new use for the product. Even organizations that continued using Google Analytics could miss some visits under their existing setup when visitors declined cookie collection. Simple Analytics was sold as a way to identify those gaps by collecting statistics that do not identify individuals alongside the existing analytics. Because customers could install it while keeping their existing analytics setup, they could adopt the product without major changes to familiar workflows.

The case of Dutch publishing and media service Hebban, published in June 2025, illustrates this use. In the company's comparison, Google Analytics recorded about 1.6 million page views, while Simple Analytics recorded 2,031,468. Hebban used Google Analytics, the consent management tool Cookiebot, and Simple Analytics together. The gap of roughly 430,000 page views between the two analytics tools gave businesses a numerical explanation for why they might need an additional tool.

In June 2025, Simple Analytics reached $41,819 in monthly recurring revenue, and annual recurring revenue exceeded $500,000. That month, it gained 37 new paying customers and lost 31. The net gain was six customers, so the growth did not come from hundreds of paying customers arriving each month. The company continued to build up small numbers of new contracts and manage the loss of existing customers.

In September that year, the company's first full-time software engineer joined. Adriaan had been spending much of his time fixing bugs and supporting customers, leaving less room to think about the product's next direction. The two concluded that this situation burdened not only the founder but also the business's operations. Hiring an engineer was a decision to share the day-to-day problem solving and give Adriaan time to reset product development priorities.

Over the course of 2025, they also formalized how they sold to business customers. They offered general customers a simple analytics interface and businesses the ability to bring collected data into existing reporting tools or data stores. The business offering also included single sign-on, access controls, contract review, and support for procurement processes. Beyond collecting statistics, the product was acquiring the capabilities organizations needed to buy and operate it.

In September 2026, the public dashboard showed monthly recurring revenue of about $50,700 and annual recurring revenue of about $609,000. According to the company's official introduction, it was a profitable three-person team operating without outside investment. The limits Adriaan had originally set on collecting personal data remained in place, while two sales approaches had taken shape on top of them: simple website analytics and data delivery for businesses. The discomfort he felt installing analytics on a client's site had grown into a lasting subscription business he owned and ran himself.