Simple Analytics
We build and sell software for businesses.
Overview
aggregated · trustmrr + sourced researchFinancials
payment-provider verified · dailyFunding & investors
sourced researchTraffic & SEO
not yet sourcedDomain rating, organic keywords, backlinks and channel mix light up once a traffic provider is wired in.
Pricing & monetization
not yet sourcedWe capture pricing as structured tiers, comparable across competitors, rather than scraping a screenshot. Simple Analytics's tiers haven't been modeled yet.
Competitive landscape
not yet sourcedA category model places Simple Analytics against its peers on pricing, take-rate and estimated ARR.
Social & community footprint
company-owned accountsCompany-owned accounts only. We deliberately omit any named individuals.
The TeardownHQ playbook
premium · editorialHow a two-person team built a $470k-a-year compliance wedge against Google Analytics
A privacy-first analytics tool that turned EU regulation into a sales force and Hacker News into a developer-led distribution channel
- 01Executive Summary
- 02Part 1: The Product
- 03Part 2: The Founder
- 04Part 3: Market & Strategy
- 05Part 4: Growth & Financials
- 06Part 5: The Replicable Playbook
- 07Sources
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Executive Summary
Simple Analytics is not really an analytics company. It is a compliance arbitrage business that sells the removal of legal risk and consent friction, packaged as a simpler dashboard. The mechanism: European privacy regulation made the free incumbent, Google Analytics, legally expensive to use, and Simple Analytics positioned itself as the thing you install instead, hosted in the Netherlands, cookieless by design, with no consent banner required. Regulators generated the demand. High-intent search terms like "Google Analytics alternative" captured it. Developers, the one buyer persona that both understands tracking and influences vendor choice, carried it into companies for free. The company never built a sales team because EU data protection authorities and Hacker News did the selling.
The numbers are small but unusually clean. Local TrustMRR Stripe-history data shows $1.73M in cumulative gross charges since August 2018, $33.9k in the trailing 30 days, and $459k over the trailing 365 days, all from a self-funded team of three (local TrustMRR data1; company about page2). The company self-reports roughly $48.7k in "unified currency" MRR across 1,320 paying customers, while TrustMRR computes $39.2k MRR from 1,308 active subscriptions34; the honest read is roughly $39-44k MRR, self-reported, not audited. Gross charge volume grew 20% in 2025 and has plateaued in the first half of 2026. This is a durable lifestyle-scale machine with one structural dependency: Google's search results page.
| Thesis component | Evidence | Confidence | Operator implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulation created the wedge: GDPR (2018) plus 2022 DPA rulings that Google Analytics transfers violate GDPR | Austrian DSB and CNIL decisions, Jan-Feb 2022 (verified, official/legal sources); gross charges grew 51% in 2022 and 58% in 2023 (local TrustMRR data) | High | Sell the removal of a legally mandated risk, not a better feature set |
| Developers as unpaid sales force | Founder interview on company press page: HN launch hit #1 for 9 hours, ~30k pageviews, ~30 paying customers; "developers are salespeople" (self-reported) | High | Pick the persona that installs the product and let them champion it upward |
| Search intent does the closing | Founder: "our most successful marketing channel is Google search... 'Google Analytics alternative'" (self-reported) | High | Own the comparison keyword for the incumbent you replace |
| Pricing rides usage, not seats | Pricing page: fee auto-scales with datapoints, ~€20 entry, free plan with badge (verified, company site) | High | Usage-metered pricing converts compliance buyers without procurement |
| Fragility: regulatory normalization plus Google dependence | EU-US Data Privacy Framework adequacy decision, July 2023 (verified); founder admits Google "could just close our revenue income from search" (self-reported); 2026 gross volume flat (local TrustMRR data) | High | A wedge built on regulation erodes when the regulation softens; diversify before it does |
What a founder should take from this teardown: find a free incumbent whose externalized cost (legal risk, consent friction, data leakage) a regulator has just made explicit, build the boring replacement with the persona who feels that cost daily, and let intent search plus practitioner word of mouth compound for five years. The rest of this report tests that thesis against the revenue record, reconstructs the first 100 users, and maps where the model breaks.
Footnotes
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Local TrustMRR raw revenue-history snapshot, 2026-06-09 (daily Stripe gross charge data, 2018-08-27 to 2026-06-09) : local artifact: /home/algernon/teardownhq-hermes/osint-work/trustmrr_revenue_history/snapshots/20260609T213016Z/raw/simple-analytics.json ↩
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Simple Analytics about page (team size, founding year, self-funded status, customer logos) : https://www.simpleanalytics.com/about ↩
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Simple Analytics Open Startup dashboard (self-reported MRR, paying customers, NPS, aggregate usage) : https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/open ↩
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TrustMRR public page for Simple Analytics (platform-computed MRR and subscription count) : https://trustmrr.com/startup/simple-analytics ↩
6 more sections: the full teardown, sourced and dated.
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