Layer 05 · Sight
Analytics — seeing the launch
Two honest answers to two different questions. The primary answers
“what is happening across everything we run?”; the alternate answers “what did people
read?” — and asks for nothing from the visitor in return.
Primary pick
Google Analytics 4
The full-depth measurement platform: events, audiences, and reporting across every property you operate.
Run by this estate
analytics.google.com
No affiliate relationship — direct link
This estate measures its portfolio in Google Analytics 4: one property
holding a stream for each site — more than twenty streams wired in a single programme —
plus a dedicated production property for the flagship product. The verdict from running
it at that breadth: setup costs an afternoon, the reporting depth exceeds what a launch
needs, and the real price is your visitors' data flowing to Google. That trade is worth
it for the primary slot; it is also exactly the trade the alternate in this layer
exists to refuse.
- Free tier
- GA4 itself is free, with no pageview charge at launch scale.
- The wall
- Free properties cap event-data retention at 14 months, and reporting thresholds and sampling arrive at serious volume. The paid step — Analytics 360 — is enterprise-priced by quotation. A distant wall, but a real one.
- Price
- $0. As checked November 9, 2026
Alternate — and why it is the alternate
GoatCounter
Deliberately minimal, cookieless pageview counting — hosted, or self-hosted as a single small program you run yourself.
Evaluated · November 9, 2026
goatcounter.com
No affiliate relationship — direct link
What the evaluation was: on November 9, 2026 we
downloaded the self-hosted GoatCounter program (v2.7.0), ran it locally on its embedded
database, created a site, embedded its counting script on a test page, and confirmed the
pageviews, referrer and browser breakdowns arriving in its dashboard. That is the whole
basis of this stamp — a hands-on trial, not production use.
When the question is only “what did people read?”, GA4 is a heavy
answer. In the trial, GoatCounter went from download to a working dashboard in minutes,
counts without cookies — so there is nothing to banner or consent to — and its reports
stop where counting stops: no funnels, no audiences, no revenue attribution. Choose it
when that minimalism is the point; choose the primary when you need depth.
- Free tier
- Hosted service is free for non-commercial sites. Self-hosting is free in all cases — the software is open source.
- The wall
- The free hosted tier is non-commercial: a business site either pays for hosted, or self-hosts and carries a small server instead.
- Price
- Hosted for business from $5/mo; self-hosted $0 software. As checked November 9, 2026