Fathom Analytics (Privacy analytics)
Created by: Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis

Fathom prices on pageviews with a 30-day trial. No self-host option, no public revenue dashboard — the price page leans on founder-led trust instead of operational transparency.

TL;DR: Fathom's pricing structure is volume-tiered subscription scaled by monthly pageviews, with a 30-day free trial and no self-host option. The structural pricing decisions diverge from Plausible's: no open-source escape valve and no public revenue page. The trust load shifts to founder visibility (Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis) instead of operational transparency. The lesson for indie founders: when founder-led-as-trust is your model, you can skip the operational-transparency proof — but you must sustain founder visibility forever.

What they sell: A privacy-focused, cookie-free web analytics SaaS positioned as the ethical alternative to Google Analytics.
Who it's for: Indie founders, small SaaS, and privacy-leaning teams who do not want cookie banners or GDPR overhead, and who prefer buying from identifiable indie operators.
Pricing model: Volume-tiered subscription scaled by monthly pageviews; hosted only
Payment frequency: Monthly or annual with annual discount; tier re-evaluated by actual monthly pageviews
Free trial behavior: 30-day free trial with no credit card required; converts to paid or expires.
Number of tiers: 2

Anchor pattern: Founder-led-trust anchor
Fathom's pricing page does not anchor through a public revenue dashboard (like Plausible) or through an explicit decoy tier. The anchor mechanic is implicit: Jack and Paul are visible enough across the marketing surface and broader content that buyers anchor on founder credibility rather than on price-comparison logic. The simplicity of the pricing matches the brand voice — founders who trust the operators do not require complex pricing arguments.

Upgrade trigger: 30-day trial expiration plus pageview growth
Two triggers fire together: the 30-day trial creates a binary conversion moment (subscribe or stop using); pageview growth then drives tier upgrades within the paid customer base. The trial-expiration trigger is mechanical and the volume-tier upgrade is structural. Both align with how indie SaaS founders actually evaluate analytics tools.

What's working:
Founder-led-trust replaces the operational-transparency proof Plausible uses — same trust outcome, different mechanism.|30-day trial with no credit card removes friction at the highest-friction moment in the funnel.|Volume tiering aligns the bill with customer success without exposing the buyer to per-event metering surprise.|Same principle stack as Plausible (privacy, GDPR-by-construction, cookie-free) — both companies validate the category together.|No self-host option simplifies the operations surface — every customer is on the same hosted infrastructure.|EU isolation option for buyers with stricter data-residency needs adds a structural differentiator without complicating the main pricing page.

What to adapt:
If founder-led-as-trust is your model, you can skip operational-transparency tools (public revenue, open-source) — but you must sustain founder visibility continuously.|30-day trials with no credit card remove the canonical friction at signup; recover the conversion at trial-end with a clear payment prompt.|Volume tiering aligns the bill with success when the underlying cost (your infrastructure) actually scales with the metric you tier on.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt founder-led-trust as the only trust mechanism if the founders cannot sustain visibility. Without founders on the marketing surface, the model collapses.|Do not skip self-host capability if your category buyers value it (open-source-aligned developers, privacy-extremists). The audience overlap with operational-transparency buyers matters.

Brunson lens:
Stack: Two-rung stack: hosted volume tiers plus enterprise custom. No add-on layer.
Value ladder: Two-rung Value Ladder with trial-to-paid conversion as the front-end trigger.
Decoy/anchor: Founder-led-trust anchor — Jack and Paul replace explicit anchor-tier mechanics with brand credibility.
Payment mechanics: Monthly or annual volume-tiered subscription; no usage metering surprise; no per-seat scaling.

Pricing last verified: 2026-05-17