Fathom Analytics, in its own terms
Fathom Analytics is a hosted, privacy-first analytics service. Pricing is tiered by pageviews and starts at $45 a month for up to 500,000 pageviews across 50 sites, with a discount for paying yearly. It requires no cookie banner, is designed to work under GDPR without consent popups, and states that customer data is never sold or used for advertising.
Checked against usefathom.com/pricing in august 2026. Products change; verify anything you are deciding on.
Where they actually differ
| Falorb | Fathom Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Self-hosted software | Hosted service |
| Licence | MIT | Commercial, closed |
| Cost | Free; you pay for a server | From $45 a month |
| Operations | Yours: upgrades, backups, uptime | Theirs entirely |
| Unit of analysis | The person, across every property | Aggregate statistics per site |
| Data location | Wherever you put the server | Their infrastructure |
| Support | GitHub issues, or managed hosting | Included in the subscription |
Which one you should actually use
- You would rather pay $45 a month than ever think about a database again.
- Nobody on the team wants to be on call for an analytics outage.
- Aggregate stats are all you actually look at.
- You want support you can escalate to, with a contract behind it.
- You already run servers, and one more service is not a meaningful cost.
- You want the raw event data in your own database, queryable directly.
- You need person-level history rather than aggregate counts.
- The bill scales with your traffic and you would rather it did not.
The Falorb side, in the real interface
vs Fathom: the usual questions
Is self-hosting actually cheaper than $45 a month?
In server cost, usually yes: Falorb is built for small-to-medium traffic on modest hardware, and the ClickHouse configuration ships tuned for a shared host. In total cost, it depends entirely on what an hour of your time is worth and how much of it operations take. That is the real trade, and it is not always in self-hosting's favour.
Can I try Falorb without committing to running it?
Clone the repository and bring the stack up with Docker Compose locally; the quickstart is five commands and needs no account anywhere. If you want it running somewhere permanent without operating it yourself, managed hosting is available on request.
Still deciding?
The fastest way to decide is to run it
Clone the repository, bring the stack up with Docker Compose and paste one script tag. Ten minutes, and no account anywhere.