Why the Analytics Industry Keeps Selling You Broken Solutions
We’ve been watching the analytics industry for over 15 years, and we need to tell you something nobody else will say out loud:
The entire analytics market is built on compromises nobody should have to make.
Every solution forces you to choose between compliance and capability, cost and control, scale and sovereignty. It’s like being asked to pick your favorite form of suffering.
Let us break down what’s really happening in each market segment—the marketing brochures won’t tell you this.
The Enterprise Trap: Pay to Play (Or Pay to Comply)
- The Players: Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics 360, Amplitude
- The Promise: “Enterprise-grade analytics with advanced features and support”
- The Reality: You’re either paying through the nose to be compliant, or you’re not actually compliant at all.
Adobe Analytics will cost you $150,000+ annually for the privilege of keeping your data somewhat under control. Even then, you’re still dependent on Adobe’s infrastructure, Adobe’s terms, and Adobe’s interpretation of your compliance requirements.
Google Analytics 360? At least Google’s honest about it—they’ll charge you $50,000+ per year and your data still lives on Google’s servers, processed by Google’s algorithms, subject to Google’s privacy policies. You’re paying for the illusion of enterprise features while Google monetizes your customer data.
Amplitude talks a good game about product analytics, but try explaining to your compliance team why user behavior data is sitting on a third-party SaaS platform in a different jurisdiction. Good luck with that audit.
Truth Bomb: Enterprise solutions are either prohibitively expensive band-aids or compliance theater. You’re not actually solving the fundamental problem—you’re just paying someone else to manage your risk.
The Mid-Market Mirage: Almost, But Not Quite
- The Players: Piano Analytics, Piwik Pro
- The Promise: “Enterprise capabilities at mid-market prices”
- The Reality: They solve some problems while creating others.
Piano and Piwik Pro give you better privacy controls than Google, sure. But try integrating them with your existing data infrastructure at scale. Try customizing them for your specific compliance requirements across different geos. Try explaining to your data team why they need to learn yet another analytics schema that’s almost, but not quite, compatible with the tools they already know.
These solutions work great until you outgrow them. Then you’re stuck migrating again, rebuilding integrations again, retraining teams again.
Truth Bomb: Mid-market solutions are stepping stones, not destinations. You’ll outgrow them, and when you do, you’re back to square one.
The Open Source Reality Check: Great Ideas, Wrong Technology
- The Players: Matomo, Umami
- The Promise: “Own your analytics infrastructure”
- The Reality: They solve the ownership problem but create new technical problems.
Matomo’s architecture made sense in 2007. In 2025, asking MySQL to handle hundreds of millions of analytics events is like asking a bicycle to compete in Formula 1. It might work for small sites, but try scaling Matomo to enterprise volumes and watch your database administrator have a nervous breakdown.
Umami is beautifully simple, which is exactly the problem. Simple works until you need segmentation, custom events, attribution modeling, or any of the features that actual businesses require at a decent scale. And SQL will not scale well at high volumes of events.
Truth Bomb: Traditional open source analytics solutions hit a wall at scale. They solve the ownership problem but create operational nightmares.
The SMB Sweet Spot: Perfect for Some, Useless for Others
- The Players: Plausible, Fathom Analytics, Simple Analytics
- The Promise: “Simple, privacy-first analytics”
- The Reality: They actually deliver on their promise—for their target market.
If you’re running a blog, a small SaaS, or a simple marketing site, these solutions are fantastic. Clean interfaces, privacy-compliant, reasonably priced. Fathom gives you the basics for $14/month. Plausible does what it says on the tin.
But try using them for e-commerce attribution, user journey analysis, or cohort analytics. Try integrating them with your CRM, your marketing automation, your customer data platform. Try explaining to your data team why they can’t do the analysis they need because the platform is “intentionally simple.”
Truth Bomb: SMB solutions work perfectly until you need them to do more than count page views.
The Comparison Nobody Talks About
Here’s what the industry doesn’t want you to see:
| Market Segment | What You Get | What You Give Up | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | Advanced features, support | Data sovereignty, budget | $50K–500K+ |
| Mid-Market | Better privacy, lower cost | Flexibility, scalability | $10K–50K |
| Open Source | Full ownership | Performance, features | Engineering time |
| SMB | Simplicity, compliance | Advanced analytics | $10–200/month |
Every option forces you to compromise on something fundamental.
What We Actually Built: The Option That Shouldn’t Exist (But Does)
After watching this industry force impossible choices for years, we decided to build the solution we needed but couldn’t find anywhere:
Scale Through Modern Architecture
We built on event streaming and columnar storage from day one. Not retrofitted MySQL hoping it’ll work. Not “big data” platforms that cost a fortune to operate. Modern technology that scales to billions of events without breaking a sweat.
Free at Enterprise Scale
100 million events per month, completely free. No “freemium” trap, no sudden pricing jumps when you hit success. Use cloud free tiers and scale to enterprise volumes without writing a check. Your data goes directly to your warehouse—we never see it, store it, or touch it.
GA4 Compatibility Without GA4 Problems
Same measurement protocol, same tracking setup your marketing team already knows. But clean schema, complete data, no nested JSON nightmares. Your data team gets usable data, your marketing team keeps their workflows.
Actually Open Source
MIT licensed, no commercial licensing tricks. Deploy it anywhere, modify it however you need, audit every line of code. When we say “open source,” we mean it.
Privacy-First Without Feature-Last
Full GDPR/HIPAA compliance with advanced analytics capabilities. Deploy in your jurisdiction, on your infrastructure, under your control. Privacy compliance that doesn’t cripple your analytics.
When your entire business model depends on vendor lock-in and artificial scarcity, actually solving the problem looks impossible.
It’s not. We did it.
Stop Accepting Impossible Choices
The analytics industry has trained you to believe you have to choose between compliance and capability, between cost and control, between scale and sovereignty. You don’t.
Your data team doesn’t need to spend half their time fighting broken schemas. Your compliance team doesn’t need to choose between usability and legal safety. Your business doesn’t need to depend on the pricing whims of analytics vendors.
There’s a better way. We built it. It’s open source. Deploy it anywhere.
Because the analytics industry’s dirty secret is that the real problem was always solvable—they just had no incentive to solve it.
We do.
Because we’re not trying to maximize recurring revenue or create vendor lock-in. We’re trying to fix a broken industry that’s wasted too many brilliant data teams’ time.
Ready to see what analytics looks like when you don’t have to compromise? The code is open source. The architecture is proven. Your data stays yours.