Marko Saric: Plausible Analytics from Cold Email to 21k+ Subscribers
Marketing co-founder who joined a privacy-first Google Analytics alternative via cold email and helped turn a slow start into a bootstrapped, open-source SaaS with tens of thousands of paying subscribers and zero ad spend.
- MRR
- Historical self-reported milestones only (current total not publicly disclosed)
- ARR
- $1M crossed in 2022 (self-reported); later figures mostly estimates
- Users
- 21,000+ paying subscribers (self-reported, 2026)
- Founded
- 2018
- Team
- 10
- Stack
- Elixir, Phoenix, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, React
How did Plausible start?
Uku Täht wrote the first line of code for Plausible in December 2018. He was a developer who had been asked to add Google Analytics to a landing page and immediately thought there had to be a simpler, less invasive option. The public beta launched on Indie Hackers in January 2019. Early marketing was pure build-in-public: updates on the blog, Indie Hackers, and Uku’s Twitter.
Paid subscriptions started in May 2019. Pricing was deliberately accessible because Google Analytics was free and most people were not used to paying for site analytics. The first month ended around $64 MRR. Growth was slow. It took 324 days after the paid launch to reach the first $400 MRR.
In February 2020, with the product still small, Uku publicly said he had been looking for a partner. He cold-emailed Marko Saric after reading Marko’s post about de-Googling a website. Marko, a marketer, joined on 16 March 2020. At that point the site was getting almost no organic search traffic and the business was still roughly $400 MRR with fewer than 100 paying customers. The complementary split (Uku on product, Marko on positioning, content, and communication) became the operating model.
The content that created the first real traction
Marko’s first Plausible blog post, published on 8 April 2020, was titled “Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website.” He submitted it to Hacker News himself. It reached the front page. The site saw more than 25,000 visitors that day and set records for trials and MRR growth. By the end of May they had crossed $1,000 MRR.
A later post on funding open source also hit the front page of Hacker News. Product Hunt brought a short spike but was never treated as a core channel. The consistent engine was writing clear, opinionated posts about privacy, simplicity, and the problems with mainstream analytics, then sharing them in places where technical and indie audiences already gathered. They spent zero on paid ads throughout.
The product itself stayed narrow on purpose: a lightweight script (under 1 KB), no cookies, no personal data, a single-page dashboard. The pitch was relief from complexity and surveillance rather than more features. Pricing is usage-based (pageviews), not feature-gated in a way that creates artificial tiers for most users.
Open source as both principle and protection
Plausible went fully open source in September 2019 under the MIT license. The goal was transparency and control for users. As the project gained attention, the team saw companies taking the code and launching proprietary competitors. In October 2020 they switched to the AGPLv3 license. The change does not affect cloud subscribers or people who self-host for their own use; it makes it harder for a company to take the code and ship a closed competing service.
They later formalized the free self-hosted release as Plausible Community Edition (still AGPL). The commercial cloud product remains the sole source of funding. Donations were tried early and produced almost nothing; paid subscriptions grew because the product solved a concrete problem. The code is public so anyone can verify the claims about cookies, data collection, and behavior. That transparency is part of the product in a privacy-focused market.
From $10k MRR to a small profitable company
They reached $10k MRR in January 2021 after roughly nine months of faster growth following the early content spikes. From there the climb continued: $500k ARR territory, then $1M ARR ($83,637 MRR) on 2 June 2022 with more than 7,000 paying subscribers. By September 2022 they posted about $100k MRR. In March 2023 Marko noted roughly $150k+ MRR, nearly 10,000 subscribers, and a team of seven, still with zero ad spend and fully bootstrapped.
The company has stayed intentionally small. Recent public updates (2025–2026) show a team of about 10 people, still remote and EU-based. Subscriber counts continued upward: 15,011 active subscribers in March 2025, later 18k+, then 20k+ and 21k+ in 2026. An official about page references more than 22,000 paying subscribers. They have highlighted large customers (including one doing a billion pageviews a month) and noted that revenue has scaled faster than headcount because they did not hire ahead of demand or add layers of management.
Exact current total MRR or ARR is not published in recent posts the way early milestones were. Third-party estimates have put the business around the $3M ARR range in late 2024; those figures are estimates, not company-reported numbers. What the founders do share consistently is the subscriber count, the absence of outside investment, and the fact that growth remains organic.
Infrastructure choices that mattered along the way included moving analytics events to ClickHouse (while keeping application data in PostgreSQL) so the dashboard stayed fast as volume grew. The stack is Elixir/Phoenix on the backend, React on the interactive dashboard, and the dual-database setup that is standard for serious analytics products.
What the work looks like now
The company continues to ship product features (saved segments, scroll depth, revenue in funnels, better APIs, white-label options for platforms) while maintaining the original constraints: no cookies, EU hosting, open source, subscriber-funded only. They have said they ignore acquisition and investment emails and still honor older pricing for long-term customers rather than forcing upgrades.
Support, documentation, and clear statements of who the product is and is not for reduce the need for a sales team. Marko has described deals that take many months of silence followed by a trial and a quote; the product does the convincing. Word of mouth and existing content continue to drive discovery. More than 2,400 teams have been paying for five years or longer according to the company’s about page.
Caveats are straightforward. Competing with a free, dominant product owned by Google is structurally hard; many site owners still default to Google Analytics out of habit. Self-hosting is available but the business depends on the managed cloud. Open source creates ongoing tension between giving the code away and protecting the commercial model. Growth has been compounding rather than explosive after the early viral posts, which means patience is required. Exact recent revenue figures are not public, so outside estimates should be treated as estimates.
Lessons that still feel true
A cold email from a founder who had already shipped something useful can change the trajectory of a project. Complementary skills (technical builder + focused marketer) mattered more than either person trying to do everything alone.
Content that takes a clear position and is shared in the right communities can create durable awareness without ad spend. The April 2020 Hacker News post did not just produce a one-day spike; it established a voice and a positioning that kept working.
Open source builds trust in a privacy market, but the license choice has practical consequences. Starting permissive and later tightening it (or choosing a license that protects the commercial model from day one) is a real decision, not a purely ideological one.
Charging for the product early, even against a free incumbent, is possible when the alternative is genuinely simpler or more aligned with the buyer’s values. Donations rarely sustain a serious open-source SaaS; customers who get value will pay.
Finally, staying small and bootstrapped for years is a deliberate constraint that shapes every other choice: hiring pace, feature scope, pricing patience, and the ability to ignore short-term pressure from investors. The public record shows a company that treated slow early progress as normal rather than evidence of failure.
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