Counter (counter.dev) is a free, privacy-friendly web analytics tool with no cookies or IP tracking. See features, pricing, and self-hosting options.
Counter (counter.dev) is a simple, privacy-oriented web analytics tool built by a single independent developer and released publicly around 2020. It was created for people who want to know how many visitors their website gets, and where those visitors come from, without deploying a heavyweight analytics suite or a cookie consent banner.
The tool deliberately limits itself to a small set of aggregate metrics rather than trying to compete with full product-analytics platforms. It does not use cookies, does not log individual visitor behavior over time, and does not store raw IP addresses, relying instead on edge-network signals to approximate a visitor's country.
Core features include unique daily visitor counts, referrer tracking to show which sites are sending traffic, and country-level geography, all shown on a minimal real-time dashboard. The JavaScript tracking snippet is about 1.1 KB, so it adds negligible weight to page load times.
The project is fully open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with the main codebase and a separate self-hosting repository published on GitHub. Self-hosted deployments run on a Go backend with Redis for hot-tier storage and SQLite for archival data, and can be deployed via Docker on modest, low-cost server infrastructure.
The hosted version at counter.dev is free with no visitor caps or gated features, operating on a pay-what-you-want model; supporters can choose optional donation tiers starting at roughly 3 euros per month. Self-hosting the open-source version is also free aside from the cost of running the small server it requires.
Yes, the hosted service at counter.dev is free with no visitor quotas, operating on a pay-what-you-want basis with optional donation tiers.
No, Counter is designed to avoid cookies, visitor-level logging, and IP address fingerprinting.
Yes, the project is open source under AGPL-3.0 and includes a dedicated self-hosting repository with a Docker-based setup.
It tracks unique daily visitors, referrer sources, and country-level location data.
No, Counter is focused on website analytics and does not offer a dedicated mobile SDK.