Help on Feasible

What's the difference between visitors, visits and pageviews?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

One person, one sitting, one page load.

Unique visitors is people. One person reading four pages this morning is one visitor.

Total visits is sittings. That’s also called a session. The same person coming back after lunch is one visitor and two visits, because a visit closes after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Total pageviews is page loads. Four pages this morning and three after lunch is seven pageviews, two visits, one visitor.

Can I import my Google Analytics history?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, as CSV.

In GA4, open the reports you want to keep - pages, traffic acquisition, locations, devices, browsers - and download each one as CSV.
In Feasible, go to Site settings → Imports.
Upload the files, or zip the folder and upload that.

It runs as a background job and emails you when it’s done. Pages, sources, locations, devices and browsers land on the same charts as your live traffic, dated where they belong, so your history sits behind the day you installed the script.

Can I run Feasible myself?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes. It’s the same build we run, with everything switched on. The full walkthrough is on self-hosted analytics.

cp .env.sample .env        # set FEASIBLE_APP_HOSTED=false
./feasible db migrate
./feasible account create --email you@example.com --name "Your name"
./feasible serve

account create prints a generated password once - generated rather than typed, so it never lands in your shell history or a process list.

There’s no cut-down edition. No Community build with the good parts removed, no license key, no feature flag that turns off the API or funnels or raw export. The API has no plan check in it at all - not one you could switch on, none written. Goals, funnels, custom properties, webhooks, the MCP server, teams, sharing, exports: all of it, free.

Do I need a cookie banner?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Most sites won’t need a consent banner for Feasible.

We don’t set a cookie. Not a first-party one, not a third-party one, not a “functional” one. There’s no identifier stored on your visitor’s device that persists between visits, so there’s nothing for a banner to ask about on our behalf. How we count people without one is a daily hash that’s thrown away every night.

The consent rules - Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive in the EU, PECR in the UK - are about storing or reading information on someone’s device, not about analytics as a category. The GDPR is a separate rulebook, and clearing one doesn’t clear the other. That’s why cookieless analytics usually falls outside them.

How big is the tracking script?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

3,377 bytes gzipped. 7,099 bytes raw.

That’s the complete script, not a loader that fetches the real one afterwards. One request, and it’s over.

For scale: it’s about 43× smaller than Google Analytics’ tag on the wire. On a slow connection that’s the difference between a measurable delay and nothing you could detect with a stopwatch.

The size is enforced rather than aspired to. The build has a byte budget baked in, and a build that exceeds it exits with an error - in the bundler and again in the Go server that serves it. It can’t drift upward quietly between releases, because a release that made it bigger wouldn’t compile.

How do I add a site?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Three fields, then one script tag.

Sign in and open Sites, then Add a site.
Enter the domain - example.com. No https://, no www., no trailing slash.
Pick the site’s time zone. Every day, week and month in your reports is drawn on that clock, and email reports go out at that site’s own midnight. You can change it later.
Copy the snippet and paste it into the <head> of every page.

<script defer src="https://app.feasible.lol/js/fs-k7m2q4x5r3n6t2v5.js"></script>

That’s it. There’s no verification file to upload and no DNS record to add.

How do I track a signup?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Send an event, then make it a goal.

1. Fire the event where the signup succeeds - after the account is created, not on the button click:

feasible('Signup')

The function is already on the page; the script installs it. If you’re sending events before the script has loaded, the standard queue stub works and they’ll be replayed.

2. Create the goal. Go to Site settings → Goals, add a goal, choose Custom event, and type Signup. The name has to match - it’s case-sensitive.

What happens after the trial?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing gets charged, because we never asked for a card.

The trial is 30 days and takes no payment details. There’s no Stripe customer until somebody decides to pay, so there’s nothing sitting there to bill you when the clock runs out.

If you do nothing, here’s the timetable. It’s the same one a lapsed payment follows, and the dates are exact rather than “around a month”.

Day	What happens
23	Email: ending soon
29	Email: ending tomorrow
30	The dashboard locks. Collection keeps running.
45, 59	Emails: collection stops in 15 days, then tomorrow
60	Collection stops
75, 85, 89	Emails: deletion in 15 days, 5 days, tomorrow
90	The account and its data are deleted

Ten emails. You won’t be surprised by this.

What is bounce rate?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The share of visits where somebody arrived, looked at one page, and left.

If a hundred visits started this week and thirty-eight of them never went anywhere else, your bounce rate is 38%. It’s one of the six tiles on the dashboard, and clicking it draws it on the graph. Every metric is defined here.

The thing to hold onto: bounce rate describes the visit, not the page. A single-page visit is a bounce regardless of how long the person stayed or how far down they read, and it’s counted against the page they landed on.

Why are my events being dropped?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Open Site settings → Health. It will tell you the reason by name.

The panel covers the last 24 hours and counts accepted events against refused ones - with a specific reason attached to every refusal. Never failing silently is the thing this product is built around, and the health panel is where that shows up.

Here’s what each reason means:

Reason	What happened
`bot`	The user agent matched a known crawler or tool
`automation`	The browser carried driver flags - Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium
`datacenter_ip`	The request came from a cloud or hosting range
`outdated_browser`	A browser more than 18 major versions behind on an auto-updating OS
`referrer_spam`	A known junk referrer domain
`unknown_site`	The snippet is for a site you haven’t registered
`hostname_not_allowed`	Served from a host outside your registered domain
`shield_ip` · `shield_country` · `shield_page`	One of your own rules
`rate_limited`	Too many requests from one address, too fast
`invalid_payload`	The request was malformed
`no_session_for_engagement`	An engagement ping with no open visit - usually harmless
`account_dormant` · `site_deleted`	The account or site isn’t collecting

The first five are normal bot filtering and usually the largest number on the page. That’s the system working.

What should my privacy policy say?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a paragraph you can paste in and adapt.

Analytics

We use Feasible to count visits to this site and see which pages get read.
Feasible sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. It doesn't record
IP addresses, and it never follows you to other websites. Visitors are counted
using an identifier that's rebuilt from scratch every day, so there's no way to
recognise the same person tomorrow.

What Feasible collects: https://feasible.lol/privacy-friendly-analytics/

If your policy is short and you’d rather have one sentence:

Can I import a CSV?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes. Loose CSV files or a ZIP of them, under Site settings → Imports.

The column headers are the interface. Give a file a recognized dimension column and one or more recognized metric columns and it imports. A column we don’t recognize stops the import and names the column, rather than being dropped quietly and leaving you with numbers that are too small.

Dimension columns: page (or path), hostname, page_title, name (or event_name), entry_page, exit_page, referrer, source, channel, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, country, region, city, device, screen_size, browser, browser_version, operating_system, operating_system_version, language.

Does Feasible slow my site down?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not by any amount you could measure.

Four reasons, all structural rather than promises.

The tag is deferred. It never blocks parsing or rendering, wherever you put it. Nothing on your page waits for us.

It’s one request of 3,377 bytes gzipped, cached for an hour with an ETag, so most loads are a 304 with no body. There’s no second file, no config fetch, no vendor chain pulling in three more domains.

Is Feasible GDPR compliant?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nobody can sell you compliance, and we won’t pretend to.

Compliance is a property of your whole site - your forms, your ads, your chat widget, your CRM, your lawful basis - not of one script on it. What we can tell you is what Feasible does, so you or your lawyer can decide.

Feasible is GDPR-friendly by construction:

No cookies and no persistent identifier on the visitor’s device.
The raw IP address never reaches disk. It’s used in memory for geolocation and the daily visitor hash, then discarded. More on that.
The visitor identifier is a daily-rotating hash. The salt changes every UTC day and old ones can’t be recovered. It’s pseudonymous, not anonymous - we’re careful about that word.
Geolocation is coarse and local: country, region, city, from a database on our own disk. No lookup service ever sees your visitor.
A data processing addendum is already part of the terms. Nothing to sign.
We don’t sell, share or broker any of it. Not to anyone.

Two things worth knowing before you decide. Our servers are in the United States, not the EU - where your data lives covers how transfers are handled. And Feasible can carry custom properties you send it, so if you push an email address into one, you’ve put personal data in yourself. The DPA prohibits it and the docs say don’t.

What does it cost to run Feasible yourself?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Whatever the cheapest box at your host costs.

The measured minimum:

	Minimum	Comfortable
CPU	1 core	2 cores
Memory	512 MB	2 GB
Disk	1 GB plus data	an SSD
OS	Linux, macOS or BSD - x86-64 or arm64

That’s the whole shopping list. No database server, no message queue, no cache, no column store, nothing to tune.

The numbers behind it, all measured rather than estimated:

About 6,000 events per second through the full accept path, per process.
Roughly 13 microseconds to accept an event.
About 210 bytes stored per event. A million pageviews stored for a full year comes to a measured 294 MB. At a million a month, a year is about 3.5 GB.

So the storage cost of a busy site for a year is smaller than a phone photo album.

What happens if I go over a million pageviews?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We email you. Nothing else happens.

The allowance is 1,000,000 pageviews and custom events a month between them, per account, pooled across every site you’ve added. You get emails at 70%, 85% and 100%. There’s no overage rate in the system, no automatic upgrade, and no tier above 100% - those numbers are the entire ladder.

One full month over the limit costs nothing at all. Not a charge, not a warning beyond the emails, not a lost row of data.

What's the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bounce rate counts visits. Exit rate counts page views. The denominators are different, and that’s the whole difference.

Bounce rate: of the visits that started on this page, how many ended there without a second pageview.

Exit rate: of everyone who viewed this page at any point in their visit, how many left the site from it.

A worked example. Ten people land on /pricing directly; four leave immediately. Another twenty reach /pricing from somewhere else on the site, and six of those leave from it.

Where do I put the tracking script?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the <head>, on every page you want counted.

<script defer src="https://app.feasible.lol/js/fs-k7m2q4x5r3n6t2v5.js"></script>

The tag carries defer, so it doesn’t block rendering wherever you put it. Head or end of body both work. Head is the habit worth keeping, because it means the tag is present before a fast clicker can leave.

On most sites there’s one file that wraps every page - a layout, a template, a theme header - and that’s where this goes. WordPress, Ghost, Astro, Next.js, Hugo and the rest all have one. Our integrations pages name the exact file for each.

Why doesn't my goal show past conversions?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Goals don’t backfill. They count from the moment you save them.

Create a goal today and yesterday stays empty, even if the events were arriving all along. The creation form says so before you save, because it’s the single most common surprise in any analytics tool.

Why not just backfill? Because the numbers would be quietly wrong. A conversion isn’t only “did this event happen” - it’s a conversion rate, which needs a denominator, and a goal’s definition can include property constraints and page patterns that were never evaluated against the events as they arrived. Recomputing all of that after the fact produces a figure that looks authoritative and isn’t. We’d rather show you an empty chart that’s true.

Why is everyone showing up in one country?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your proxy isn’t passing the visitor’s address along, so every event looks like it came from your server.

The symptom is unmistakable: one country with everything in it, usually where your hosting provider’s datacenter is, and a visitor count that collapses to almost nothing. Both come from the same cause. The IP address is what geolocation and the daily visitor hash are built from, so if every request carries the same address, every visitor is the same visitor.