Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business → Umami, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, Umami costs you $371 more over 3 years.
This one only pays off if your hour is worth less than
$28.68/hrThat is a low bar. Unless your time is genuinely cheap, or you would enjoy running Umami enough not to count the hours, Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business is the better deal.
Running it yourself is not worth your hours — but paying PikaPods $2.80 a month to run it is. The arithmetic below is for doing it yourself.
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
| Linode Nanode 1GB 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 25 GB disk · 0.98 TB transfer | $5.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 20 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.14 |
| Your time 0.4 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $20.00 |
| Every month | $25.14 |
| Migration, once 3 hours of your time, our estimate | $150.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $5.00 vc2-1c-1gb · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $5.00 Nanode 1GB · used above
- DigitalOcean $6.00 1 vCPU · 1 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | −$6.14 |
| After one year | −$224 |
| After 3 years | −$371 |
Or don't run it yourself
This is the case the arithmetic above misses. Running Umami yourself is not worth your hours — but paying PikaPods to run it is.
PikaPods runs Umami from $2.80/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Umami their published minimum for this app | $2.80 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $2.80 |
| Migration, once 2 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $100.00 |
| After 3 years, against Plausible Analytics (Cloud) Business | $483 |
At $50 an hour that saves $483 over 3 years, against a $371 loss for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Umami and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Linode box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Plausible's polish, and its funnels and revenue tracking
- A hosted service run by people who care about privacy analytics specifically
- Email reports and shared dashboards without configuration
You gain
- Postgres or MySQL instead of ClickHouse, which is the difference between a 1 GB box and a 4 GB one
- No pageview ceiling
- MIT licensing
Read this before you decide
- Historical data does not transfer. You start counting from zero unless you write the import yourself.
- Plausible Cloud at $19 a month is genuinely cheap. This comparison exists because Umami is light enough to change the answer, not because $19 is outrageous.
- Umami's reporting is thinner than Plausible's. If you actually read your analytics rather than just collecting them, that matters.
Is the project alive?
umami-software/umami has 39,459 stars, was last pushed 2 days ago, and last cut a release (v3.4.0) 32 days ago. Licence: MIT. 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 |
| Linode plan catalogue | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| umami-software/umami activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 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 Linode, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.
Every route out of Plausible Analytics (Cloud) · this comparison as JSON