Plausible counts the taps on Rich's phone number

"Is the website doing anything?" Rich asked me from the cab of his van, mid-sandwich, between a sump pump and a water heater job. Rich runs Hafner Plumbing. Two guys, a van, a website I built and a bill I send him every month. And I realized I had never once shown him a number from it. Not one. That question sat with me the whole drive home.

Here's the thing. The website's job is to make the phone ring, and almost nobody who owns a small business knows whether it does. I put every client site I keep on Plausible's Business plan, $19 a month or $190 a year for up to ten sites, and set exactly one goal on each: the tap-to-call button. Now Rich gets one number every month, and the number is phone taps, not visitors.

What it costs

Plausible prices by how much traffic you get, and none of my sites are giants, so we all live at the bottom rung, 10,000 pageviews a month.

1. Starter, $9 a month, one site. Fine if the website is just yours.
2. Growth, $14 a month, up to 3 sites and 3 people on the dashboard.
3. Business, $19 a month, up to 10 sites and 10 people. This is mine: nine client sites plus my blog.
4. Yearly billing takes two months off every plan, so Business runs $190 a year. That's $19 a site, per year, which sounds like a typo. It isn't.

Goals and custom events are on every plan, even the cheapest. There's a 30-day free trial and no free tier after that, unlike the free tools we'll get to. If you'd rather not pay at all, their self-hosted community edition is free, and you run it on your own server. That's a real option, and it's a Saturday of work. I pay $190 a year on my card and spread it across the clients, because ten sites at $19 each per year is the cheapest honest counting I've found.

What I actually set up

1. Put Plausible's script on each site. It's tiny, under 1KB, and it doesn't slow anything down. Total work, about an hour across ten sites.
2. Made one goal per site: clicks on the phone number button. On Rich's site that's the big tap-to-call bar at the top of every page.
3. Set a weekly email report to Rich and to me, so the number shows up on its own and nobody has to go looking.
4. Deleted the Google Analytics tag I had been carrying around out of habit. It was free and nobody had opened it in two years.

The first full month on Rich's site, the goal counted nine taps on the phone button. Nine people in a month went from his website to his phone. I can't tell you that's good or bad, because I don't know what his competitors count. What I can tell you is that before, the number didn't exist, and now it does, and Rich checks it like he checks the fuel gauge.

A word on privacy, because Plausible makes a point of it. They say they use no cookies and collect no personal data, which is why there's no cookie banner to add. That's the vendor talking, not me, and I'm not a lawyer. Ask your own if your situation is unusual.

The hour meter version

An hour meter on a compressor doesn't make the compressor work better. It tells you whether the thing ran, how long, and when it quit. You charge by what you know, and the meter is what you know. That's all this is. One meter per site, one needle, pointing at the only output that matters to a plumber: phone taps.

What will annoy you

There's no free tier on the cloud version, period. The trial ends and the meter starts billing. If you want free, the options are self-hosting or Google Analytics, and I'll say this for Google: it's free, it's everywhere, and it's a dashboard built for people who dream in sessions and dimensions. I walked Rich through it once, on his phone, in a driveway. He closed it and said, "I can't even find the phone number in here."

One more thing to know. If your traffic stays over your plan's limit two months in a row, they email you, and if you don't act within a week they lock the dashboard until the next billing cycle. The data keeps collecting in the background, and it opens back up on its own if traffic drops back under. I've never tripped it. My sites would have to multiply by forty first. But it's in the terms, so now it's in your head too.

And it has no heatmaps and no session replay. If you want to watch people move their mouse around, that's a second subscription. Rich doesn't want that. Rich wants the phone to ring.

What to do Monday

Ask yourself what one number would prove your website is worth its bill. For a plumber it's phone taps. For a diner it's the menu page. For an office it's the map link. Open whatever counts your traffic and go find that one number. If it doesn't exist anywhere, that's your Monday job, because a site you can't measure is a site you're taking on faith.