You write content. You want to know what people read, where they come from, and which posts resonate. You do not want to spend an afternoon learning Google Analytics 4 to find out. sourcebeam gives you clear, honest analytics for your blog — starting at free.
Free
For most blogs
<1 KB
Script size
0
Cookies
Which posts get read. sourcebeam shows you pageviews by URL — a clear, ranked list of your most-visited posts. Not buried in a multi-step report, not hidden behind segments and filters. You open your dashboard and immediately see which posts are getting traction today, this week, or this month. You can compare time periods to see which posts are growing and which are declining.
Where your readers come from. sourcebeam tracks referrers and UTM parameters automatically. You can see exactly how many readers arrived from Google search, from Twitter, from a link on someone else's blog, from Hacker News, from a newsletter, or from a Reddit thread. This tells you where to invest your distribution effort. If 70% of your traffic comes from organic search, that is a signal to double down on SEO. If a single referral from a niche forum drives more engaged readers than all of Twitter, that is worth knowing.
How readers engage with your content. Time on page tells you whether people actually read your post or bounced after the first paragraph. Bounce rate tells you whether your content is a dead end or whether readers explore your site further. Session duration tells you how long readers stay across multiple pages. sourcebeam tracks all of this automatically — no scroll tracking scripts to install, no engagement events to configure.
Who your audience is. Country, language, device type, browser, and screen size — all captured automatically. You might discover that 40% of your readers are on mobile, which means your blog's mobile reading experience matters more than you thought. Or that a surprising percentage of your readers come from a country you never considered, which might influence the topics you write about or the examples you use.
Under 1 KB. No npm packages. No build step.
GA4 was designed for app analytics, not content. Google Analytics 4 was built around the concept of events, users, and sessions — a model designed for tracking complex user interactions inside web applications. For a blog, you want something much simpler: which posts get read, and where do readers come from. GA4's interface makes this simple question surprisingly hard to answer, buried under layers of event configuration, data streams, and exploration reports.
The cookie banner ruins the reading experience. Your blog's first impression should be your content, not a consent popup. Cookie banners are visually intrusive, especially on mobile where they can cover half the screen. They also reduce the accuracy of your analytics — readers who decline cookies become invisible to GA4, creating a blind spot in your data. For bloggers who care about both reader experience and data accuracy, this is a lose-lose trade-off.
Google Analytics slows down your blog. GA4's tracking script adds 45+ KB of JavaScript to every page. For a blog where the core content is text and images, this analytics script might be the heaviest JavaScript on the page. It adds to load time, hurts Core Web Vitals, and ultimately affects your search rankings — the very channel that likely drives most of your traffic. sourcebeam's sub-1 KB script is 45 times lighter.
You are giving Google your readers' data. Google uses Analytics data to build advertising profiles and improve its ad targeting. When you install Google Analytics on your blog, you are helping Google learn about your readers' interests and browsing habits. If you write about privacy, technology ethics, or data rights, having Google Analytics on your site is a contradiction your readers will notice. sourcebeam does not share data with third parties.
Starts at $5/month. For most personal blogs, that is still a low-friction way to get privacy-friendly analytics without dragging in a heavy, enterprise style tool. If your readership is modest, the entry price stays easy to justify.
No bloated setup. Sign up, add the script tag, and your analytics are live. No enterprise onboarding, no trial countdown, no "freemium" feature games. You get the real product from the start.
If you grow, costs stay reasonable. A blog with 50,000 monthly pageviews — a successful blog by any measure — would cost roughly $14/month with sourcebeam. Compare that to Fathom at $15/month, Plausible at $9/month, or the hidden cost of "free" Google Analytics (consent management platform, compliance time, performance impact, reader trust).
A blog with 50,000 monthly pageviews would cost roughly $14/month with sourcebeam. Compare that to the hidden cost of 'free' Google Analytics — consent management, compliance time, performance impact.
Newsletter signups, product launches, affiliate links. Many bloggers monetize through newsletter subscriptions, digital products, affiliate links, or consulting inquiries. sourcebeam lets you set up conversion goals for these actions and track which blog posts drive the most conversions — not just the most traffic.
A post that gets 500 readers and generates 20 newsletter signups is more valuable than a post that gets 5,000 readers and generates zero. Without conversion tracking, you would optimize for the wrong post. sourcebeam shows you the difference, broken down by traffic source, so you know which distribution channels drive engaged readers — not just casual visitors.
Revenue tracking for monetized blogs. If you sell digital products, courses, or memberships through Stripe, sourcebeam attributes every sale to the blog post and traffic source that drove it. You can see that your tutorial on JavaScript closures generates more ebook sales than your post on React hooks — a direct signal for what to write more of.
sourcebeam's read-only API is designed for LLM consumption. Connect it to Claude or ChatGPT and ask questions in natural language instead of navigating dashboards.
"Which posts have the longest average reading time?" "How did my traffic from organic search change compared to last month?" "What are my top 10 referrers this quarter?" "Which posts have the highest bounce rate — and which have the lowest?" Get answers in seconds, identify trends, and decide what to write next based on data, not gut feeling.
sourcebeam is a single script tag. It works with WordPress, Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll, Astro, Next.js, Gatsby, 11ty, Squarespace, Webflow, Substack custom domains, and any other platform that lets you add custom HTML. No plugin to install, no build process to modify, no compatibility issues.
If you migrate your blog from one platform to another — WordPress to Ghost, or Jekyll to Astro — your analytics continue uninterrupted. Move the script tag and your data keeps flowing. No migration wizard, no re-configuration, no data loss.
Starts at $5/month. Takes 30 seconds.