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

One company answers that every year, in public, with its own numbers.

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. That’s hardly the stuff of SaaS growth legend.

So why read it?

Because 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.

How far did the numbers move in 2025?

Here are the 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. It runs from low-cost plans used by individual developers to the enterprise customer in healthcare acquired in 2025.

What’s for sale is depth of privacy

Pirsch’s product pitch has been consistent.

Cookieless measurement, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and being “developed in Germany, hosted on servers in Germany.” It sells privacy down to where the data physically lives.

That’s nearly the same playbook Plausible used. 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.

In 2025 alone it 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’s a substantial year.

A small SaaS competes on keeping the improvements coming, more than on breadth of features.

The bot surge became a product

The AI-traffic classification feature is the telling one.

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, they’re a direct cost too.

Pirsch turned that headwind straight into a product feature: telling AI-driven visits apart.

1. Bots and AI crawlers surge

   Data gets noisy, and every recorded event adds server cost.

2. Ship AI-traffic classification

   The problem becomes a metric customers want to see.

3. Strengthen bot filtering the same year

   Speed of response to an industry-wide problem becomes the differentiator.

On customer acquisition, the report highlights winning one enterprise customer in healthcare in 2025.

Cheap plans for individual developers serve as the entry point. 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.

Margin is protected in the details

What stands out in this year’s report isn’t a flashy initiative. It’s 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.

Flip it around, and that figure isn’t 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.

What isn’t growing shows up too

At the same time, the numbers state the problems plainly.

There’s no distribution mechanism like Tally’s “99% of features free” approach.

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. It also answers the switcher’s question of whether development is actually continuing.

0.7% a month is a balance that breaks with one more full-time hire

In Pirsch’s fifth year, the numbers explain why it didn’t stop more clearly than why it grew.

The market supplies a tailwind in GDPR and data sovereignty. The break-even point has been pushed down to one person’s salary. The industry-wide headwind of bot traffic has been turned into features.

Our reading is that it takes all three at once for 0.7% a month to keep compounding instead of ending in an exit.

Flip that around and the balance has no room for expansion.

0.7% monthly growth stops working the moment you add full-time headcount. Choosing to scale would require a different growth engine.

The analytics-alternative market also depends on switching demand.

Interest surges whenever Google changes course. But you can’t 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.

Where does 0.7% go next year?

That alone makes it worth reading again.