Why I Ditched Google Analytics for Self-Hosted Umami (And You Should Too)
Let's be honest: Google Analytics is a privacy nightmare wrapped in feature bloat. Yes, it shows you session recordings and funnel visualization and a hundred metrics you'll never look at—but at what cost? You're loading 50KB+ of JavaScript, dropping cookies on every visitor, and sending their data to Google's servers where it becomes... well, who knows exactly. For a personal blog or a startup's marketing site, this exchange makes zero sense.
I needed something simpler. Something that tells me: how many people visited? Which pages are popular? Where are my visitors coming from? That's it. Three questions, three answers, no creepy tracking.
That's when I found Umami.
What Makes Umami Different
Umami is an open-source web analytics platform designed from the ground up for privacy-first websites. It doesn't use cookies, it doesn't collect personal data, and it complies with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR requirements out of the box. Your visitors don't need to see a cookie consent banner—because there are no cookies to consent to.
The interface is refreshingly minimal. Dashboard shows you real-time visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, and referrers. That's the whole story. No data lakes to query, no custom dimensions to configure, no attribution models to understand. If you want deeper analysis, the SQL database is right there for you to explore.
The Stack That Keeps Costs Low
Here's where it gets interesting. Self-hosting sounds expensive, but it doesn't have to be. I built my Umami setup on three services that play well together:
Supabase handles the database. The free tier gives you 500MB of database space and 2GB of transfer—plenty for sites under 100k monthly pageviews. The PostgreSQL interface is clean, backups are automatic, and performance is solid.
Fly.io runs the Umami application itself. Their free tier includes 3 shared VMs, which is more than enough for a low-traffic analytics server. Fly's global anycast routing means your analytics collector is close to your visitors, reducing latency on tracking requests. This matters more than you'd think—slow analytics scripts get blocked by ad blockers, and nobody wants that.
Cloudflare sits in front as a CDN and SSL terminator. You can proxy your Fly app through Cloudflare's network, get free edge caching, and handle DNS in one place. The setup is straightforward, and it adds a layer of resilience without adding cost.
The Real Cost
My setup runs me about $5/month—mostly the Supabase database tier since I occasionally push past the free limits. For that price, I get:
- Privacy-compliant analytics that my users actually appreciate
- Full data ownership (my numbers stay on my infrastructure)
- No tracking scripts getting blocked by browser extensions
- Performance that doesn't tank my site's load times
- The warm fuzzy feeling of not feeding Google's advertising empire
Getting Started Takes an Afternoon
Setting this up isn't trivial, but it's not black magic either. You deploy Umami to Fly, point it at Supabase, configure environment variables, and update your DNS. The Umami documentation is solid, and the community is helpful. A tech-savvy developer can have everything running before dinner.
What's your analytics setup looking like? Still tolerating Google's cookie banners? Maybe it's time to try something lighter. Your visitors' privacy (and your wallet) will thank you.