Measurement, honestly
Every site we build measures itself. Nobody else is listening.
Most agency sites do one of three things. They fly blind, with no measurement at all. They install Google Analytics, hand their client's visitor data to an advertising company, and bolt on a consent banner to make it legal. Or they pay monthly for a "privacy-friendly" analytics SaaS — better, but still a third party your visitors have to talk to, and still someone else's server holding your data.
We do none of those. Every site we build ships with analytics that set no cookies, make no third-party requests, and need no consent banner. Here is the mechanism, because the mechanism is the point.
How it works
Self-hosted, in France
Self-hosted Matomo, on our own server in France. Not Google Analytics. Not a subscription. The data lives on infrastructure we hold the contract for, inside the EU. No advertising company ever touches it, and nothing is sold, shared or enriched.
Relayed through your domain
The tracker is relayed through your own site. This is the part that matters. The analytics script and every measurement request are served from your domain, through your site's own Cloudflare Worker. Your visitor's browser never contacts our analytics host — it doesn't know it exists. "No third-party requests" isn't a promise we're asking you to take on trust; it is how the thing is built. A useful side effect: because nothing looks like a cross-site tracker, far less of your traffic is silently discarded by ad-blockers.
Cookieless, IP truncated
Cookieless, and the IP is truncated before it is stored. Nothing is written to your visitor's device for analytics purposes. Their IP address is anonymised on arrival, before anything reaches disk.
DNT & GPC honoured at the edge
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are honoured at the edge. If a visitor's browser sends either signal, the measurement request is discarded before it ever reaches Matomo. Not recorded then deleted — never recorded. Matomo has no Global Privacy Control handling of its own; enforcing it at the edge is what makes this structural rather than a setting someone could flip.
Why there is no banner
The cookie banner exists because of ePrivacy Art. 5(3), which governs storing or reading anything on a visitor's device. We store nothing, so there is nothing to ask permission for. Measurement still needs a lawful basis under the GDPR — that is legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) — and the configuration follows the CNIL's guidance for audience measurement exempted from consent.
The banner disappears because the corner was never cut. It is not a loophole; it is the consequence of the design.
We test it. We don't just say it.
Plenty of sites claim "no cookies, no trackers" without ever having checked, and some of them are simply wrong. On every deploy, an automated browser run loads every page of the site on two engines with the tracker live, and asserts that the cookie jar is empty, that no request leaves your domain, and that the tracker actually fired. A wider run across viewports and both themes goes nightly. If the blocking run fails, the deploy does not happen.
We also prove the tests can fail. The suite runs a control case that plants a cookie and a foreign request, and it must catch both before any result is trusted. A test that has never failed is a test nobody has verified.
The contact form counts too
"No third-party requests" is easy to claim if you stop counting at page load. Most contact forms post to a form service, and that is a third party handling your visitors' names, emails and messages. Ours posts to your own domain, and your own site sends the message from your own mail system to your own inbox — via Microsoft Graph when you run Microsoft 365. The visitor's browser never talks to anyone but you, submission included.
What we don't claim
- Your site is delivered through Cloudflare, a US company, and the relay runs on their edge. That is a real jurisdictional fact and we would rather write it down than let you discover it.
- Honouring Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control means some visits are deliberately never counted — the numbers are honest, not complete.
- And this covers our analytics and our forms — if your site later embeds a map, a video player or a chat widget, that is a third party, and it may bring a banner back with it. We will tell you before it happens.
What comes with it
A GDPR Art. 28 data processing agreement, with every sub-processor named. A privacy policy written to match what the site actually does, shipped in the same release as the tracker — never bolted on afterwards. Raw data kept for twelve months, then deleted automatically. And your own Matomo login, scoped to your sites and nothing else.
Frequently asked questions
Is this legal without a consent banner?
Yes. The banner obligation comes from ePrivacy Art. 5(3), which governs storing or reading anything on a visitor's device — we store nothing, so there is nothing to ask permission for. Measurement itself still needs a lawful basis under the GDPR, which is legitimate interest under Art. 6(1)(f), and the configuration follows the CNIL's guidance for audience-measurement tools exempted from consent.
Can I see the reports myself?
Yes. You get your own Matomo login, scoped to your sites and nothing else — view-only, so you can check your own numbers whenever you want.
What happens if I leave?
Your data is exported to you, then deleted from our server. The relay itself is a few lines in your own site's repository, so removing it — or handing the whole thing to someone else — is straightforward.
Does this work on WordPress or Shopify?
The relay needs a site we host, so it is straightforward on anything we build. On platforms we don't control — WordPress, Shopify and similar — what is achievable depends on the platform, and we will tell you honestly rather than oversell it. See Self-Hosted Analytics below for what we can still do there.
Why not Plausible or Fathom?
Both are good products. They are also a third party and a monthly fee, and the measurement request still leaves your domain — the thing this page is about not doing.
Explore
Want a site that measures itself honestly?
Every site we build ships with this. If you already have a site, we can add the relay to it.