Plausible 30-day trial: when indies should buy Starter before lockout

When indies install Plausible on a new product, every account starts with a thirty-day free trial. During the trial you get Business-level features and limits, with no credit card and no automatic charge. The real decision is at trial end: without a subscription the dashboard locks and collection stops; docs also say trial stats are not kept forever and may be permanently deleted after email warnings. This page does not compare Plausible’s privacy philosophy with GA4. It freezes trial rules versus Starter using plausible.io/docs/trial, subscription-plans, and the site pricing section on 2026-10-03—Starter observed around $9 per month for up to about 10k monthly pageviews. Re-check tiers and currency before checkout.

What the trial actually includes

The trial doc states every account starts with a thirty-day free trial; during the trial you can use Business plan features and limits; signup asks for no credit card, so the trial never auto-converts and there is nothing to “forget to cancel.” For indies that is friendly: install the script, test goals, then decide to pay. It also means the trial is not a permanent free cloud tier—without a subscription you lose a usable dashboard.

Put day twenty on the calendar: export critical views, confirm pageview magnitude, and choose Starter, Growth, or Business. Finish core events and goals during the trial so you are not discovering missing instrumentation on the last day.

What Starter buys versus doing nothing after trial

Subscription-plans positions Starter for one site and solo use without team sharing; Growth for multiple sites or client sharing; Business for funnels, user journeys, revenue goals, Stats API, and more. Yearly billing saves about two months. The site pricing section on the observation day showed Starter around $9 per month for up to 10k monthly pageviews (higher pageviews step up). Versus “trial ends, do nothing,” Starter buys a living dashboard, continued collection, and a chance to keep trial history if you subscribe before deletion—docs stress deleted stats cannot be recovered.

If you need multi-site sharing or funnels, map Growth/Business directly; do not buy the wrong tier and call missing features a bug—that is plan definition. When pageviews far exceed 10k, price the higher row instead of forcing Starter.

Signals that the trial should become a paid plan

Subscribe first when the product is live for real users and you need week-over-week continuity; day twenty-five still assumes long-term privacy analytics rather than a short experiment; monthly pageviews fit the 10k tier or you accept a higher tier; you received trial-end or deletion warning email. Docs say an unsubscribed ended trial locks the dashboard and eventually deletes data, so “wait two more weeks” can erase the baseline.

You can skip paying if the project stopped, you will self-host Community Edition, or you only needed a short bake-off and already exported screenshots. Skipping needs no cancel action—there was no card. If you return later, subscribe before deletion to keep history; after deletion recovery is gone.

Finish the decision inside the trial window

Week one: install and core goals. Week two: read real traffic into a pageview tier. Week three: match Starter/Growth/Business features. Week four: pay or export and walk away. Write “subscribe before deletion to keep history” as a checklist item. If you also run GA4 for comparison, decide which stack remains before the trial ends so you do not lose Plausible history while dual-tagging.

Do not confuse cloud trial with self-hosted CE

“Plausible can be free” sometimes means self-hosted Community Edition: you pay for servers and ops, not a Plausible subscription. Ending a cloud trial without paying does not become CE automatically. If the goal is zero subscription cost and you can operate infrastructure, follow self-host docs; if the goal is managed convenience, buy Starter. Write that boundary into team consensus so day thirty does not turn into “but it is open source free.”

Baseline actions on subscribe day

On subscribe day do three things together: confirm Starter (or a higher tier) is active, unlock the dashboard and resume collection, and export key trial reports once. Even if you later upgrade or move to self-host, you keep a decision baseline. Indies running multiple product sites should re-match Growth on day twenty using subscription-plans instead of defaulting to Starter forever.

Common misreads versus the official rules

A common misread is hearing “no credit card trial” as permanent free hosted analytics. Official cloud service expects a subscription after trial. Another misread is ignoring deletion risk and assuming locked stats stay recoverable forever. Archive trial and plans docs with this slug dated 2026-10-03. For privacy selection read the privacy guide; this page only answers trial to Starter timing.

Keep this separate from the privacy guide

Toolvori already has a Plausible privacy-oriented guide. That page answers why and how to choose privacy analytics. This page answers lockout, deletion, and Starter purchase after the thirty-day trial. Next time someone says “Plausible can stay free forever,” ask whether they mean the cloud trial or self-hosted CE.

How to use this in a shipping checklist

Copy thirty days, lock/delete, and Starter ~$9/10k into the launch checklist. Tick: trial near end; continuous data required; pageview tier matches; exported or subscribed. Pay only when boxes tick. Pin plausible-trial-indie-when-to-starter. Revisit in ninety days: if pageviews stay far under 10k, keep Starter; if multi-site needs appear, evaluate Growth.