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Frequently asked questions

• What is GoatCounter best at?

  Being a free, tiny, radically private pageview counter. There are no cookies or localStorage, IP addresses are never stored, and the whole project is open source and funded by donations rather than ads or investors. Pulsetic asks a different question: not how many people came, but how fast the website was for them and whether it was up at all.

• How much does GoatCounter cost?

  Nothing. GoatCounter is entirely free, funded through GitHub Sponsors, with fair-use limits on the hosted service and self-hosting encouraged for heavy use. There are no paid tiers at all. Pulsetic also has a free plan with 10 monitors, status pages and 1,000 RUM pageviews a month, with paid plans from $9 when you need more.

• Does GoatCounter measure page speed or Core Web Vitals?

  No, and that is by design: GoatCounter is a deliberately minimal pageview counter, not a performance tool. There are no load times, no Core Web Vitals, no error tracking and no realtime view. Pulsetic records LCP, CLS, INP, FCP and load time percentiles (p50, p75, p95) from real visits, on every plan.

• Can GoatCounter tell me when my website is down?

  No. GoatCounter has no uptime monitoring, no alerting and no status pages, and because its dashboard updates in batches rather than realtime, even a traffic drop takes a while to show. Pulsetic checks your website as often as every 30 seconds from 15 regions on the Team plan and above. It alerts you by email or webhook on any plan, or through Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, SMS, WhatsApp and phone calls from the Solo plan up.

• Is Pulsetic a drop-in replacement for GoatCounter?

  No. Pulsetic does not count unique visitors and does not track events, goals, funnels or UTM campaigns. If GoatCounter is doing the counting job for you, keep it; it is excellent at that job. Both scripts are tiny and cookieless, so they coexist fine: GoatCounter for traffic, Pulsetic for performance and uptime.

• Does Pulsetic's tracking script use cookies?

  No. Like GoatCounter, Pulsetic sets no cookies and writes nothing to localStorage. There is no client-side visitor identifier at all, because Pulsetic does not need to count unique visitors. The script sends up to two small performance beacons per pageview, with no sampling.

• What does Pulsetic cost when GoatCounter is free?

  Honest answer: Pulsetic has a real free plan too, with 1,000 RUM pageviews a month, 10 monitors and status pages, commercial use allowed. Paid plans from $9 buy things a free counter was never meant to provide: uptime monitoring at scale, 30-second checks on the $19 Team plan, retention from 1 to 5 years and human support. And if GoatCounter covers everything you need, supporting it with a donation is money well spent.

• When should I add or switch to Pulsetic?

  When the questions change: you care less about how many people came and more about why the website felt slow, whether Core Web Vitals pass, and who tells you when it goes down. Pulsetic answers those from its free plan up. Most GoatCounter users would add Pulsetic rather than switch, since the two measure different things and both scripts stay out of the way.