Google Analytics is "free." I run Matomo instead — here's why.
If you open the network tab on this site, you won’t find Google. You’ll find Matomo — self-hosted, cookieless, on infrastructure I control. That’s a deliberate choice, and the reasoning is the same one behind everything else here: own the thing that matters, and don’t rent your independence. Analytics just happens to be the cheapest, easiest place to start.
What Matomo is, and how it’s used
Matomo is open-source web analytics — the mature, full-featured alternative to Google Analytics. You use it almost identically: drop a small JavaScript snippet on your pages, and you get dashboards for visitors, traffic sources, top pages, goals, funnels, and the rest. You can self-host it (a container on a box you own) or use their paid Matomo Cloud if you’d rather not run it — the same managed-vs-self-hosted decision every service comes down to.
Two differences you feel immediately:
- It can run cookieless. In cookieless mode there’s often no cookie banner to show — because you’re not setting the tracking cookies that trigger the consent requirement in the first place. Fewer pop-ups, less legal surface.
- You own 100% of the data. It sits in your database. Nobody else gets a copy, and nobody else decides what happens to it.
”Free” Google Analytics — the actual price
Google Analytics costs $0 because you are not the customer. Advertisers are. Your visitors’ behavior is the raw material that feeds Google’s ad machine, and “free” is what they charge to collect it through you. That trade is fine for some people. It’s worth seeing clearly before you make it.
When Google stops being free — or becomes a liability
The zero on the invoice hides three real costs that show up later:
1. Legal exposure (this is the big one). EU data regulators have repeatedly ruled that using Google Analytics is unlawful under GDPR — Austria, France, and Italy all found, in 2022, that sending EU visitor data to the US violated the law after the Schrems II ruling. A new EU–US Data Privacy Framework in 2023 patched the legal basis, so it’s not a settled “GA is illegal” today — but that framework is already being challenged in court, and its two predecessors (Safe Harbor, then Privacy Shield) were both struck down. Building your compliance on it is building on ground that has collapsed twice already.
2. Continuity you don’t control. In 2023 Google killed Universal Analytics and forced everyone onto GA4 — a different, widely-disliked interface, on Google’s timeline, with years of historical data you couldn’t cleanly carry across. If your analytics history and workflow can be deprecated out from under you whenever the vendor decides, you never actually owned them.
3. It’s only free up to a point. GA4 samples data above certain thresholds, so at scale you’re looking at estimates, not counts — and the un-sampled, enterprise tier (GA360) is emphatically not free. “Free” has an asterisk that grows with your traffic.
And underneath all of it: your business’s behavioral data lives on the servers of a company that competes in a dozen markets and monetizes information for a living — reachable, as a US provider, under the US CLOUD Act. That may not be a problem for you. It’s worth deciding on purpose, not by default.
Google Analytics costs $0 because you are not the customer.
What Matomo gives you back
- Data ownership. It’s in your database. No third party, no ad platform, no copy you can’t delete.
- Privacy by default. Cookieless, IP-anonymization, honors Do-Not-Track — often no consent banner needed.
- No sampling. You see real numbers, not a modeled estimate, at any traffic level.
- Your history stays yours. Import your old Universal Analytics data; keep it as long as you choose.
- Open source. Auditable, and impossible to sunset out from under you — if the company vanished tomorrow, the software you’re running keeps running.
- No lock-in. Standard, exportable, yours.
The philosophy — the part that actually matters
Strip away the feature list and this is one idea, the same one behind leaving the hyperscalers:
- Independence from sudden rule changes. Deprecations, pricing shifts, policy rewrites, forced migrations — a tool you own doesn’t get changed on someone else’s schedule. The UA→GA4 sunset is the whole argument in one event.
- Privacy as a value, not an afterthought. Don’t hand your visitors’ behavior to an adtech giant to save the cost of a small server. Your users didn’t agree to that; you did, on their behalf.
- Stability and longevity. Open-source software you run is durable. It’s not a free product that gets killed the quarter it stops serving the vendor’s strategy.
- Your data isn’t anyone else’s business. Keep the record of how your business works out of the hands of a company whose business is knowing things.
Analytics is a small thing to own. That’s exactly why it’s a good first step — low stakes, quick to do, and it proves the larger point: the tools you depend on shouldn’t be ones a stranger can change or switch off.
The honest caveats
I won’t pretend it’s free of trade-offs — that would make me the thing I’m warning you about:
- Self-hosting is a (small) ops job — the “who runs it at 2am” question in miniature. You run it and keep it updated; on a shared box that’s modest, but it isn’t zero. Matomo Cloud removes that for a monthly fee.
- If you live inside Google Ads, GA integrates more tightly with campaign data and attribution. Heavy paid-acquisition teams may genuinely prefer it. If you’re not running big Google Ads campaigns, that advantage doesn’t apply to you — and most sites aren’t.
- Matomo is the full GA replacement, but it’s not the only one. If you want something even lighter, Plausible, Umami, and GoatCounter are excellent, privacy-first, and simpler. Matomo is the right pick when you want GA’s depth without Google.
For this site the choice was easy: I don’t run Google Ads, I care about my readers’ privacy, and I’d rather not build on a legal or product foundation someone else can pull. So it’s self-hosted Matomo, cookieless, no banner — practicing what the rest of this site preaches.
If you’re on Google Analytics mostly because it was the default, moving to self-hosted Matomo is a small, satisfying first step off the Google stack — and it’s the same muscle as the cloud-exit work I do. Every message comes straight to me — I read and reply to each one myself, usually within a day, and what readers send shapes what I build next. It’s just me for now, so that’s genuinely true; it won’t be forever. Ask me about moving off Google’s tools and I’ll tell you the honest trade-offs for your setup — free, within a business day.