Simple Analytics: The GA Alternative Streaming Its $51K MRR and 1,328 Customers Live — Year Eight After a #3 Product Hunt and #1 Hacker News Launch

SaaS revenue updates can cherry-pick the flattering moment. Simple Analytics gave up that option voluntarily. It maintains a permanent public dashboard of its own operating metrics, and as of August 2026 it showed roughly $51.1K in MRR, 1,328 paying customers, and $613.8K in ARR, refreshing every few minutes. NPS over the last 30 days: 75, all-time: 57. Good months and bad months alike are visible to anyone.

Simple Analytics is an analytics SaaS launched in 2018 by Dutch developer Adriaan van Rossum. Its pitch is a cookie-free, privacy-respecting design sold as a monthly-subscription alternative to Google Analytics. Its customers’ sites have logged a cumulative 21 billion pageviews, 9.4 billion visitors, and 4.5 billion events since September 1, 2018. This is the unembellished present state of a business that has run for eight years on a single premise: a simple GA alternative.

The numbers

A two-stage launch rocket

The initial thrust came from a successful community launch. In September 2018 it reached #3 overall on Product Hunt and won a privacy-category award. On Hacker News it hit #1 within five minutes of posting and held the spot for more than nine hours. That exposure alone brought the first 30 paying customers, the founder writes.

What matters is that this success meshed with the product’s nature. The Hacker News readership is the population most sensitized to “I don’t want to hand my data to Google,” and a privacy-first GA alternative strikes that nerve precisely. The launch venue coincided with the habitat of the target customer. A generic tool launching in the same place would not ignite the same way.

The other precondition was the small size of the bet. The MVP took two months to build. Rather than polishing before launch, the order was: test market response with minimal investment. The launch grew the Twitter following from 60 to about 800, which became the base for future distribution. Two months of development and one launch yielded 30 paying customers and an 800-person audience — more than enough return on the initial stake.

When exposing your dashboard becomes customer acquisition

The $30K ARR blog post lists the growth channels: traffic via documentation, manual conversations on Twitter, and exposure from customers publishing their own stats. Simple Analytics lets customers make their dashboards public, and every published dashboard works as a live product demo. Publishing the company’s own operating numbers extends the same philosophy, running as a self-described “Open Startup” is itself content.

Public operating metrics have a lineage in this space. Baremetrics, famous for publishing its own numbers and ultimately sold for $4M in cash, is the archetype, and Simple Analytics belongs to the same “turn transparency into a trust device” pattern. An analytics tool is a business of holding customers’ data. A company that shows its own numbers is easier to trust than one that hides them. The product and the disclosure are well matched.

Paid from day one

Pricing policy has been consistent: paid from the start, with a brief free-tier experiment that was rolled back to paid-only. Instead of holding a large free user base and waiting for conversions, the design serves only paying customers. Simple arithmetic on the published figures: 1,328 customers at $51.1K MRR is roughly $38 per customer per month, a price band that catches everyone from solo bloggers to small businesses, stacked 1,300 times into $600K+ of ARR. The public dashboard also shows satisfaction: NPS of 75 over the last 30 days and 57 all-time. In low-price subscriptions churn decides everything, so including a satisfaction metric among the published numbers is coherent.

How to read the growth rate

At the same time, this is not an ambitious growth curve. $30K ARR in 13 months, then about seven years to $613.8K, roughly 20x, but annualized it is steady compounding, not a hockey stick. In the same privacy-analytics market, the later entrant Plausible reached $1M ARR with four people and zero ad spend. The accurate positioning is not “market winner” but “solid surviving mid-field.” In a market ruled by the free giant Google Analytics, a business that charges on conviction alone tends to have a low ceiling too.

The risk also lies in the nature of the numbers. Live metrics are a snapshot of now. Growth rates and churn trajectories can only be followed fragmentarily from outside. The figures in this article are the August 2026 display and may differ next month, which is precisely what live disclosure means.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

Three things generalize. First, match the launch venue to the target customer’s habitat, a community launch only ignites when there is an alignment of concern, like privacy product × Hacker News. Second, products whose customer output is public (public dashboards and the like) turn the customer base itself into advertising inventory. Third, for products that hold customer data, disclosing your own numbers works as proof of trustworthiness.

The limit is speed. Paid-only, ad-free, conviction-driven growth is gradual, eight years to $613.8K ARR, and like Transistor, which went from $33 in month one to $1M ARR as a deliberately “calm company”, it suits a solid business compatible with a sane life, not a campaign to take the whole market. Choosing this pattern means accepting its ceiling along with it.