Plausible Analytics: an open-source SaaS with public numbers, from $0 to over $1M ARR in three years

Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics tool, open source and self-hostable, sold as a hosted subscription. Uku Täht started it in 2019 and Marko Saric joined in 2020 to run marketing; the two of them published the company's revenue milestones on the blog as they passed them, from the first $400 a month to more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 2022, and later figures higher still. It is the case to read for anyone whose property is open-source software or a developer tool.

The property

A SaaS with an unusual twist: the code is public under an open-source licence, so anyone can self-host it for free, and the company sells the hosted, maintained version. The audience is developers, indie makers and privacy-conscious site owners who were looking for an alternative to Google Analytics, which was also the search query the company's content targeted.

The revenue mix

• SaaS subscriptions, priced by monthly pageviews, starting at a few dollars a month and billed through Paddle as merchant of record so that VAT and sales tax across Europe and the US are handled. This is effectively the whole business; the blog has stated that the company runs no ads and pays for no advertising.
• Affiliate: a small partner programme for people who recommend Plausible, and revenue from being recommended by others, which in the open-source world happens through blog posts, GitHub stars and word of mouth rather than affiliate networks.

Why it worked

Marketing by writing. Saric's posts about why Google Analytics is a privacy problem, how the company operates, and its revenue numbers ranked in search and were shared widely in developer communities; the open-source licence made the product easy to recommend and hard to distrust. The self-hosted option, which looks like giving the product away, worked as distribution: many self-hosters became paying customers when they tired of maintaining it, and the ones who did not still recommended it.

The founders also wrote about the trade-offs of being open source, including competitors forking the code, and about pricing changes; that transparency is much of why the numbers are trusted.

What to take from it

Open source is a distribution strategy, and the hosted subscription is the monetization; the pattern is common in developer tools (Ghost runs the same model for publishing). The SaaS subscriptions guide covers the billing choices, and Plausible's blog is a good primer on why a merchant of record made sense for a two-person team selling to forty countries.