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The three options people compare here measure different units, so their free tiers cannot be put side by side honestly. Plausible counts pageviews, Vercel counts events, Umami counts hits plus each stored event property. More usefully: the one already built into your host cannot record a form submission or an outbound click at all unless you pay for Pro.
Neither Plausible nor Umami pays me anything. Figures below are from each provider's own pages, checked 10 October 2026.
What do the three actually cost?
| Plausible | Umami Cloud | Vercel Web Analytics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | none — 30-day trial | Hobby, free | included on Hobby |
| Free allowance | n/a | 100,000 events, 1 site | 50,000 events |
| Cheapest paid | $9/month, up to 10k pageviews | from $20/month | $0.03 per 1,000 events on Pro |
| Self-host | yes, open source | yes, always free | no |
| Unit counted | pageviews | hits + stored event properties | page views + custom events |
The bottom row is the one that makes the rest of the table misleading. A hundred thousand Umami events and fifty thousand Vercel events are not two points on the same scale, and neither is ten thousand Plausible pageviews. If you want a real comparison, run one for a month and look at what it reports — which, given two of the three are free, is a cheap experiment.
What does the free Vercel tier leave out?
More than the event count suggests.
| Hobby | Pro | Pro + Plus add-on | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Included events | 50,000/month | billed per event | billed per event |
| Reporting window | 1 month | 12 months | 24 months |
| Custom events | no | yes | yes |
| UTM parameters | no | no | yes, +$10/month |
Two of those rows matter more than the price.
No custom events on Hobby means you cannot record a newsletter signup, a click on an affiliate link, or a checkout starting. You get page views. If your signup form submits without changing the page — which is how most of them work — then as far as your analytics is concerned nothing happened.
No UTM parameters until the add-on is the one that catches people out. The standard advice for measuring social posts is to tag every link with campaign parameters. On Hobby those tags are collected as part of the URL but not broken out for you, and on plain Pro they still are not. That is $10 a month on top of Pro before the thing most people are trying to measure becomes visible.
The whole list
67 tools, what each costs and when you actually need it. Updated twice a year.
And what happens when you cross the free limit?
Collection stops rather than costing you money. On Vercel's Hobby plan there is a three-day grace period, then events stop being captured, and you wait seven days before collection resumes.
So the failure mode is a gap in your data during your busiest week, which is the week you most wanted the data. Free hosting until it is not covers the same pattern across the rest of that platform.
Which should you actually pick?
It depends on one question: do you need to measure things that are not page views?
If page views are enough — you want to know which articles get read and roughly where people arrive from — use whatever is already switched on. For a site hosted on Vercel, that is Vercel Web Analytics, it is free up to 50,000 events, and setting it up is a toggle. Fifty thousand page views a month is a long way away for a new site.
If you need to see signups and clicks, the built-in free tier is the wrong tool, and the cheapest honest route is Umami: free for 100,000 events on one site in the cloud, free forever self-hosted, and custom events are not gated behind a plan.
If you want the reporting to be good rather than adequate, Plausible is the one people stay with. $9 a month and no free tier is a real decision rather than a default, which is the point — it is a product you choose, not one you end up with.
What about running two?
Reasonable, briefly, and not forever.
There is a decent case for leaving the built-in one on — it costs nothing and it is already there — while running a second that can see events. The scripts do not conflict and the overhead is a few kilobytes.
What you should not do is leave both on permanently and then wonder why the numbers disagree. They will, always, because they count differently and filter bots differently. Pick the one you will actually open on a Monday and treat the other as a backup.
What does none of them tell you?
Why anyone left.
Every tool here will show you that 40 people landed on a product page and 39 did not buy. None of them will tell you whether the price was wrong, the page was confusing, the thing was not what they expected, or they were never going to buy and arrived by accident.
That gap is not closed by a better analytics tool. It is closed by asking people, and the smallest useful version is a one-line question on the page or a reply-to on your delivery email. What are the five numbers worth checking weekly? is about not drowning in the ones a dashboard does give you.
Where these numbers came from
Plausible's pricing page, Umami's pricing and documentation, and Vercel's Web Analytics limits and pricing documentation — all checked 10 October 2026. Prices in US dollars.
Analytics pricing moves and allowances tend to grow. What does not change is the structure: free tiers cap the event count, paid tiers unlock the event types, and the thing you most want to measure is usually an event type rather than a page view.
Tools in this piece
| Tool | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Plausible | Simple, privacy-friendly visitor stats with no cookie banner. | ~€9/mo |
| Umami | Same idea, free if you host it yourself. | Free self-hosted |
| Vercel | Hosting. Puts a project live on a real address with one command. | Free tier |
Every tool has its own page with the price, who should skip it and what to check before paying. Some links are affiliate links.
Questions people ask
Is there a free web analytics tool that is not Google?
Yes. Umami Cloud has a free Hobby tier of 100,000 events a month on one website, and Umami is free to self-host. Vercel includes 50,000 events a month on its Hobby plan. Plausible has no free tier — it is $9 a month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews after a 30-day trial — but it is open source and can be self-hosted.
Can Vercel Web Analytics track button clicks or form submissions?
Not on the Hobby plan. Custom events require Pro. On Hobby you get automatically tracked page views and nothing else, which means a signup or an outbound click is invisible unless it causes a page change.
Can you see UTM campaign parameters in Vercel Web Analytics?
Only with the Web Analytics Plus add-on, which is $10 a month per team on top of Pro. It is not included on Hobby and not included on plain Pro, which matters if you planned to tag your social links.
Are the free tiers comparable?
No. Plausible's limit is monthly pageviews, Vercel counts events where an event is a page view or a custom event, and Umami counts hits plus each stored custom event property. The same traffic produces different counts in each.
How long is the data kept?
Vercel keeps a one-month reporting window on Hobby and twelve months on Pro. Self-hosted Umami keeps whatever your database keeps. This is the limit people notice last and regret most.
What does none of them tell you?
Why someone left. All three show you that a visitor arrived, what page they saw and roughly where they came from. None of them explains the decision, and no amount of switching tools produces that.