Included specifically because most case-study collections have nothing at this scale, and this scale is where most successful bootstrapped companies actually live.
The original problem. Google Analytics is free, dominant, invasive, enormous (the script is hundreds of kilobytes), and in the post-GDPR era a legal liability in the EU. A meaningful minority of site owners wanted a simple, privacy-preserving, cookie-free alternative and were willing to pay for it.
Founders. Uku Täht, an Estonian developer, built the first version in 2018–2019. Marko Saric, a Danish/Serbian marketer with a blogging and content background, joined as co-founder in 2019. The division is unusually clean: one builds, one does distribution. Neither was in Silicon Valley; neither raised money.
Validation. Täht built it in the open and wrote about it. The founding insight was tested cheaply: publish the idea, see whether people with the problem self-identify. They did — privacy-conscious developers, EU companies worried about GDPR enforcement, and people ideologically opposed to Google.
First customers and how they got them. Almost entirely content and community. Saric wrote posts with titles that named the enemy directly ("Why you should stop using Google Analytics"), which performed extremely well on Hacker News, Reddit and in the indie-hacker community. Open-sourcing the product (AGPL) added a second channel: GitHub itself. They documented reaching $400/month in about a year, then $1M ARR by 2022 (Plausible, "How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS"; Plausible, "How we bootstrapped to $500k ARR") [Founder-published, unaudited].
Business model. Straight subscription, priced by monthly pageviews, starting around $9/month. Self-hosting is free under AGPL — a choice that gives away revenue in exchange for distribution and trust, and which the founders have defended explicitly as a trade they would make again.
Growth strategy and its ceiling. No ads, no sales team, no funding. Growth is content, word of mouth, and the structural tailwind of European data-protection authorities ruling against Google Analytics (the Austrian DSB and French CNIL decisions in 2022 were free marketing worth more than any campaign). That tailwind is also the vulnerability: if enforcement relaxes, the wedge narrows.
Mistakes. The founders have written about underpricing early and about the drag of supporting self-hosters who will never pay. They have also acknowledged that being open source means competitors can fork them, which has happened.
Current status (September 2026). Independent, bootstrapped, profitable, a team in the low teens. Third-party trackers put ARR somewhere in the low-to-mid single-digit millions [Estimate — the company stopped publishing detailed revenue after the $1M milestone].
Lessons that generalize.
- A few million in ARR with a tiny team and no investors is a genuinely excellent outcome, and it is roughly 1,000x more achievable than the outcomes in Part 3 of this chapter. It is also the outcome almost no one writes case studies about, which distorts what founders think success looks like.
- Positioning against a named incumbent is the cheapest distribution available — but only when the incumbent has a real, articulable defect (here: privacy and regulatory exposure). "We're a simpler X" without a defect to attack does not generate the same content leverage.
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