Pirsch Analytics: One-Employee GA Alternative Grows MRR From $11,000 to $14,300, Publishing Its Numbers Every Year

Web analytics tools positioning themselves as Google Analytics alternatives have become a market of their own over the past several years. Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics — the names that come up are almost fixed, and there seems to be little room for latecomers. In that market, Germany’s Pirsch Analytics keeps publishing an annual “earnings report” on its own blog, laying out a full year of numbers.

According to the 2025 recap, MRR grew 24% from about $11,000 at the start of the year to about $14,300 at the end. Annual net sales were around $130,000. Paid subscribers grew from 553 to 627. And the company still has exactly one employee. The two co-founders keep a part-time distance, “occasionally working on Pirsch.”

Founded in 2021, the company is now in its fifth year. Annualized, growth works out to roughly 0.7% per month, hardly the stuff of SaaS growth legend. What makes this record worth reading is that it shows, in concrete numbers published every year, how a third-place-or-lower player survives and inches forward in a market where the winners appear to be decided.

The 2025 numbers

Key figures from the company’s own report:

With 627 subscribers against $14,300 MRR, simple arithmetic puts revenue per customer at roughly $22 per month. That average folds together a wide price range, from low-cost plans used by individual developers to the enterprise customer in healthcare acquired in 2025.

The product being sold is depth of privacy implementation

Pirsch’s product-side pitch has been consistent: cookieless measurement, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and being “developed in Germany, hosted on servers in Germany.” Selling privacy down to where the data physically lives. This is nearly the same playbook Plausible used to grow to $1M ARR with four people and zero ad spend. Attract customers who share the philosophy, and be there when they decide to switch.

What the latecomer Pirsch adds is implementation depth for developers. It maintains integrations for React, Vue, Angular, WordPress, Webflow and more, and in 2025 alone shipped a URL shortener, conversion-rate graphs, chart annotations, AI-traffic classification, hourly filtering, a rebuilt WordPress plugin, a colorblind-friendly dashboard mode, and Google Search Console keyword filtering. For one employee, that is a substantial year, evidence that a small SaaS’s competitiveness rests not on breadth of features but on continuity of improvement.

The AI-traffic classification feature is emblematic. The 2025 recap names the surge in bot and AI crawler traffic as a major operational challenge. For an analytics tool, bots are noise that corrupts data, and, since every recorded event costs server resources, a direct cost as well. Pirsch converted that headwind straight into a product feature: distinguishing AI-driven visits. Stronger bot filtering shipped the same year. The speed of response to an industry-wide problem is itself being used as differentiation.

On customer acquisition, the report highlights winning one enterprise customer in healthcare in 2025. Cheap plans for individual developers serve as the entry point, while upper-tier customers accumulate slowly in heavily regulated industries, and healthcare has some of the heaviest privacy requirements anywhere. The cookieless design and German hosting double as the enterprise sales deck.

Cost discipline shows in the details

What stands out in this year’s report is not a flashy initiative but P&L detail. In 2025 Pirsch standardized billing for eurozone customers to euros, because roughly 10% was being lost to currency conversion. For a $14,300-MRR business, cleaning up billing currency alone is a margin improvement of several percent.

The team structure follows the same logic. One full-timer, two co-founders part-time. Because fixed costs are held to roughly one salary, the business works at $14,300 a month. Conversely, that figure is not yet enough for three people to live on full-time. Combining part-time founders to lower the break-even point is the very structure that keeps a niche SaaS alive.

Not looking away from what isn’t growing

At the same time, the numbers state the problems plainly. Monthly growth of 0.7%. 74 net new customers a year is about six a month. As the 2026 plan to “increase blog posts to one per month” suggests, marketing is territory the company has barely entered. There is no distribution mechanism like Tally’s “99% of features free” approach that reached $150K MRR in four years, organic growth from product improvement and word of mouth appears to be the entire engine.

Still, publishing the numbers every year is itself a sales asset at this scale. Transparency resonates with privacy-minded customers and answers the switcher’s question of whether development is actually continuing.

Conditions for repeatability, and the limits

What generalizes from this case: first, even a third-place player in an established market can keep compounding without exiting, if the niche has structural tailwinds like regulation (GDPR) and data sovereignty. Second, a minimal team including part-time founders can lower the break-even point enough that $14,300 a month sustains a business for five years. Third, the engineering capacity to turn shared industry headwinds, like bot traffic, into features is a small team’s weapon.

The limits are equally clear. 0.7% monthly growth is an equilibrium that collapses the moment you add full-time headcount, choosing expansion would require a different growth engine. The analytics-alternative market also depends on switching demand: interest surges whenever Google changes course, but you cannot summon that wave yourself. For a company just starting marketing with one blog post a month, waiting for demand waves is a constraint, not a strategy.

These are self-reported figures, not audited financials. But few companies publish MRR, net sales, and customer counts in the same format year after year, and as a fixed-point observation of a niche SaaS’s “life-size year five,” the record is valuable, worth reading again next year to see where 0.7% goes.