Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business → Plausible Community Edition, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, Plausible Community Edition costs you $1,594 more over 3 years.
Plausible Community Edition costs more than Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business in cash alone at this size.
—Before a single hour of your time is counted, it is already behind. No hourly rate makes it pay.
Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business is billed flat rather than per seat, so team size does not change this comparison.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business $19.00/month, flat, billed annual | $19.00 |
| Every month | $19.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 30 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.21 |
| Your time 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $57.71 |
| Migration, once 4 hours of your time, our estimate | $200.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | −$38.71 |
| After one year | −$665 |
| After 3 years | −$1,594 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Funnels, ecommerce revenue tracking and several other features that are cloud-only
- Managed ClickHouse, which is the part of this stack most likely to bite you
- Supporting a small independent company that publishes its own self-hosting guide
You gain
- Analytics data on your own infrastructure, which is the actual point for most people who ask
- No pageview ceiling
- AGPL-3.0
Read this before you decide
- We expect this page to tell most readers to stay. Plausible Cloud is cheap, the CE build drops features, and ClickHouse is not a database you want to learn during an outage.
- Plausible CE is deliberately a subset of the cloud product. Check the feature matrix before you migrate, not after.
- This escape is here precisely because it usually loses. A site that only publishes wins is a marketing site.
Is the project alive?
plausible/analytics has 29,547 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v3.2.1) 157 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Plausible Analytics (Cloud) figure is the site's own wording: “Business /year /month $19 /month ... Up to 10 sites”.
| Plausible Analytics (Cloud) pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| plausible/analytics activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.
Every route out of Plausible Analytics (Cloud) · this comparison as JSON