simple-web-analytics.com

What It Is

Counter is a lightweight web analytics tool showcased on simple-web-analytics.com, positioned as “Easy Web Analytics.” Its core selling points are simplicity, privacy-friendliness, and open source. It is a good fit for users who do not want to introduce a complex tracking stack and only need to understand basic website traffic performance.

Core Features and Data

Based on the page information, Counter provides daily unique visitor statistics and lets you see which external websites are sending traffic to you, i.e. referral source analysis. It emphasizes “Focus” and only shows essential information, so it is not a full-featured platform for complex marketing attribution or growth experiments. Its privacy stance is a highlight: it does not use cookies, does not log data, and does not fingerprint IP addresses, which makes it appealing to sites that care about compliance and user privacy. Data scale, retention period, tracking script details, and API capabilities are not disclosed.

Pricing and Open Source

Pricing information is fairly limited. The page states “Pay when ready / Start paying whenever you want” and says it provides free, privacy-friendly analytics for everyone. This can be understood as a low-barrier model where you can start using it first and pay when you are ready, but there are no specific plans, prices, payment methods, or enterprise options listed. The project code is open-sourced under the AGPL-v3 license, with frontend, backend, and service-related projects available on Github. This provides a relatively high level of transparency and also makes it easier for technical teams to audit the code or evaluate self-hosting.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are a restrained, easy-to-understand product design, a clear privacy model, and the added trust that comes from being open source. For personal blogs, open-source project pages, and small official websites, unique visitors and referral websites already cover basic operational needs. The limitations are also obvious: the page does not show features commonly used by marketing teams, such as conversion funnels, event tracking, ad attribution, A/B testing, or segmented reports. Support channels, integration methods, service SLAs, and payment details are also unclear.

Who It’s For and Access from China

Counter is better suited to individual site owners, developers, small teams, and privacy-conscious content sites. If you need full SEO/SEM attribution, ad ROI analysis, or multi-team permission management, you may need to consider alternatives such as Google Analytics, Plausible, Matomo, or Umami. Access from China cannot be determined from the crawled text alone; network connectivity, payment availability, and Github access stability all need to be tested in practice.