A free trial isn't the same as "free for low volume / hobby usage". Not sure if that's what the OP is after, but it's what I'm after.

And to head off a couple of popular distortions/digressions:

1. There's a difference between wanting a free hobby tier and believing that I'm owed a free hobby tier.

2. Just because a company should be paid for their work doesn't imply that I'm obligated to use their product.

In this space I think wordpress.com provides a decent free tier, obviously only for wordpress sites, they have the pay for premium features instead of googles usage based policy.

I hate free trials, especially for my site. They get you hooked and then you have to cancel. It's not productive.

They get you hooked, aka proof their worth, and when it’s time to pay they have proven their worth. Or not.

Free trials are just fine like that.

Usually I look for a 'pricing' tab. Clicking on 'start free trial' tell me they are going to ask me for my email, instead of telling me how pricing works

Pricing can be seen at https://plausible.io/#pricing

6$ / month for a personal website.

12$ / month for a startup.

36$ / month for a business.

$6 is about the cost of monthly hosting for many personal websites. I'd argue theres not a good value proposition here, at the low end of the scale at least.

I think $6/mo. for fast, privacy-focused analytics for small sites is very reasonable.

There's no ad revenue to support this business — the website owner is the customer, not the product. That is a different business model from Google analytics or WordPress free analytics.

Depends what you use it for; if you're just vaguely curious about how many people visit which page on your site – which is probably what a large part of people use it for on their person sites – then $6/month is comparatively a lot, especially if you consider there are competitors which offer it for free (not just GA).

“From X” doesn’t sound like a flat fee, but either tiered or usage based, where the $6/m is the lowest possible you can pay.

I think if they can just be clear that they will do 10 million impressions per property per month for free forever that would clarify the free tier (and match google I think).

We do over 25m impressions a month and it's still get GA for free

I don't see why the price of GA is relevant to plausible's pricing.

With Google analytics, you are the product, not the customer. Free ad-supported SaaS is really a different value proposition from non-ad-supported paid services.