Best Analytics for Indie Hackers in 2026

Indie hackers ship fast, often with side projects, and care about a small set of analytics questions: how many visitors did the launch get, where are they coming from, what page is converting, and how much revenue (if any) am I making.

They don't need attribution modeling across 90-day windows. They don't need SQL access to their analytics. They don't need cohort analysis tools or heat maps. They need a clean dashboard, real-time visibility during launches, and ideally revenue tracking — all without spending more than 5 minutes on setup or more than ~$10/mo on the tool.

These are all the tools that hit the indie-hacker price point. Mixpanel, PostHog, Amplitude, and Adobe Analytics start at $50–500/mo and are wrong-sized for a side project.

Three features make Sleek a natural choice: native Stripe revenue tracking, the AI chat, and the public dashboard URL.

Stripe revenue tracking: most indie hackers run on Stripe. Sleek's integration is a single restricted-key paste — no event tagging, no integration code. Once connected, your dashboard shows MRR alongside traffic. You can see directly that the Show HN post drove 5K visitors and $400 in MRR within 24 hours. That visibility is hard to get on any other tool without writing code.

AI chat: indie hackers don't have an analyst on staff. The AI chat lets you ask questions in plain English and get answers from your real data. "Did Reddit drive any signups last week?" gets you a direct answer with the page-by-page breakdown — no dashboard navigation required.

Public dashboard URL: indie hackers love radical transparency. Sleek has built-in support for a public URL (yourproject.getsleek.io/your-slug) that shows your real traffic to anyone. Great for tweeting traction, sharing in build-in-public communities, or proving credibility to early customers.

Plausible includes 50 sites in its entry plan vs Sleek's 3. If you have a portfolio of 5+ small sites — a habit common with indie hackers running multiple side projects — Plausible's site allowance gets meaningful.

Plausible is also open source and self-hostable. If you're ideologically committed to open source or want to run analytics on your own infrastructure, Plausible Community Edition is free (you pay for the server). Sleek is closed-source and cloud-only.

On price-per-event, Plausible is more expensive: $9 for 10K events vs Sleek's $9 for 50K. If your sites add up to more than 10K monthly events, Sleek is cheaper. If they're each under 2K, Plausible's 50-site allowance wins.

GA4 is free, which makes it tempting. But the cost isn't the problem — the friction is. Setting up GA4 takes 30 minutes minimum, and that's before you configure cookie consent, custom events, or attempt to make sense of the default dashboard.

For an indie hacker shipping a new project every few months, that 30-minute tax compounds. A privacy-friendly tool that takes 60 seconds to install pays for itself in saved time on the first project, let alone the fifth.

GA4 also penalizes the indie hacker on accuracy: ad blockers (35–60% of technical audiences), cookie consent (10–30% drop in EU), and bot inclusion (5–20% inflation) all distort the dashboard. The dashboard you build mental models from is meaningfully wrong.

PostHog and Mixpanel are product analytics tools — they track in-app events (button clicks, feature usage, funnel drop-off) at scale. They're great for SaaS products with a meaningful in-app journey, but they're wrong-sized for a marketing site.

For an indie hacker with a marketing landing page and a Stripe checkout, PostHog's feature set is mostly unused. Their pricing also ramps quickly past indie-hacker levels — PostHog's "Total events" pricing means a moderately busy product hits $100+/mo fast.

The right indie-hacker stack is: Sleek for marketing-site analytics + Stripe revenue, plus optionally PostHog or Mixpanel free tier if you have an actual product surface to track. Don't use PostHog for marketing-site analytics.