> Does anyone happen to know of a service like this that is free (not self hosted) for non-commercial, low-traffic sites?

Panelbear is privacy-friendly, and has a free plan with 5,000 page views per month. Commercial use is allowed.

https://panelbear.com

Full-disclosure: I’m running this service. Feel free to ask me anything :)

Panelbear is great, I'm using it. I have a small website with < 1000 page views a month and the free plan of planelbear is perfect!

Thank you for providing this service.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

I would recommend GoatCounter.

https://www.goatcounter.com/

And there was me hoping for one of those old-school page-counter.gifs, but with numbers made out of goats...

I thought that tracking cookies needed permissions regardless of whether they were first party or 3rd party?

Parent commenter says:

> I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it

You don't need tracking cookies to track simple metrics like pageview numbers.

EU law states that you have to disclose you are using ANY cookies that are NOT REQUIRED for the correct functioning of the site (for the end user).

So yes, use of tracking cookies, first or third party, would require a Cookie Consent Banner.

> not self hosted

you'll need a cookie banner then

Not necessarily. Only if personal data is collected by the third party.

I thought that with the recent changes to PECR they that clarified any non-essential cookie-like technology needs permission, irrespective of whether it's first party or pseudonymous. And additionally that analytics does not count as strictly necessary.

That seems to be the advice of the UK ICO: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...

You need to notify users, and give them an opt-out, if the cookies are not strictly necessary for the provision of the service.

Analytics cookies are not strictly necessary.

All I want to see are pageviews. That shouldn’t require cookies/fingerprints.

It shouldn't, but nowadays it always does.

Alternatively your pagecount will shoot to the millions if you have someone holding f5.

To be fair, most of them probably do. It's not like the introduction of GDPR in Europe 2 years ago suddenly made all of the shit a marketing dept shoves into Google Tag Manager completely legit and above board.

These third parties will take what you give them and _also_ take what they can get from your browser if you're embedding their script. Are you going to proxy those scripts as well to stop them getting the user's IP address and then geolocating it to grab even more info?

The cookie warning banner is bullshit only in the sense that it achieves nothing. Accept it or deny it, it won't change a thing. Same with the tracking consent popups: despite the law saying they should be opt-in by default, they're still treated as opt-out by default, meaning that all of these sites _still_ collect your data because you're blacklisting individual sites from tracking, as opposed to whitelisting them. You need to set a cookie to say that you don't want tracking and not thousands of cookies to say you do want it?

That's being tracked... it's all wrong. Literally everything you offer as information, or don't offer, is another node in their graph.

It really shits me that a lot of them you can't even deny it. They just have a button like "I understand".

WTF is that...

Or they treat continuing to use the site as consent. Some of them are really passive-aggressive about it too. I've seen cookie banners with wording like "We use cookies, because duh, who doesn't in 2020? Click here or keep using the site to accept."

Completely at odds with the whole "informed consent" thing.

And then they wonder why we use things like uBlock, which are pretty much the only tools we can rely on to genuinely revoke consent. Or revoke as much of it as possible.

I have nothing directly against cloudflare but I think it would be better to try to support one of the smaller analytics companies if possible. They are the ones who made products that got big companies like cloudflare interested in the space.

An analytics service designed to add value to another product and does not need to be profitable in itself sounds like the best kind to me.

"We are democratizing web-analytics" wow, really? Well the people have voted and they want no analytics at all. Thank you very much.

Oh, this is perfect, thank you!

I developed for myself krlx.fr/feu-analytics/ for exactly the same scenario.

It is self-hosted but on firebase and taking advantage of the free tier. Of course there is no personal data collected at any point.

There are still improvement to do, but as it works perfectly for me I have not be able to gather enough motivation to do that.

You can probably find some at https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-analytics

Few years back I created some HelloWorld application on Google's AppEngine (requires Java, Python or Go) and was positively surprised about its statistics on theirs dashboard.

I was also surprised but the number of different dumb bots that had tried to brute-force our app engine site on /wp-login.php

and it wasn't even running on wordpress

I get requests to /wp-login.php (and the like) on my simple Haskell web app hosted on my university's servers. They're quite persistent and I'm not even sure how found the URL to my app in the first place (the format is something like universityname.com/~userid/projectname, and I haven't linked it anywhere).

https://simpleanalytics.com/ Says this on their homepage: We don't use cookies or collect any personal data. So no cookie banners, GDPR, CCPA, or PECR to worry about.

Seems like a cool company/project to me.

But, it's not free :( $19/mo Still thought it's worth pointing out.

Netlify Analytics is $9/mo

My approximate budget was $10 per year, not month! :)

Fair enough! Probably not going to happen without self hosting.

Make the visitor counter great again!