Every analytics tool will show you a number.Fewer will tell you how they got it.
Six questions worth putting to anything you are considering installing. They name no products and rank nothing — each one just has an answer that can be checked. Inqetra’s are written out below, including the ones that do not flatter it.
How do you count a unique visitor, and is that written down anywhere?
Every tool reports a different number for the same traffic, and the difference is entirely in this answer. A product that will not describe the mechanism is asking to be trusted on the one figure most people quote.
Inqetra’s answer
A visitor is SHA-256 of a salt that rotates at midnight UTC, the site id, and the address and user agent. The raw inputs never leave the function that hashes them.
Uniqueness is decided when the event is written, not when it is read, because the hot store has no COUNT(DISTINCT) and the question cannot be asked later.
What happens to my totals when you start sampling?
Most stores sample above some volume. The failure mode is not an error — it is a number that is quietly too low, on a chart that looks completely normal.
Inqetra’s answer
Above roughly a million writes a minute the store keeps a subset of rows and records how many real events each one stands for. Every total is multiplied by that factor before you see it.
The weighting is built into the one helper that constructs queries, so there is no path to a total that skips it.
How long do you keep it, and what happens if I downgrade?
Retention and deletion are different promises, and plenty of products let the first imply the second.
Inqetra’s answer
30 days on Free, 90 on Pro, 12 months on Scale.
Nothing is deleted when you move down a plan. Every event is streamed to the lake as it arrives on every plan, so retention limits how far back you can query, not how much was kept.
Where is it processed, and what leaves that place?
“We don’t sell your data” and “your data never leaves this jurisdiction” are different guarantees, and only one of them is checkable.
Inqetra’s answer
Ingest runs at whichever Cloudflare colo is nearest the visitor. That is fast, and it is not a data-residency guarantee — if you need one region only, this is the answer to weigh.
What does not leave: the raw address. It is hashed where it arrives and never written to any store.
Can I send events from my backend, or only from the browser?
Anything a browser asserts, a visitor can assert too. Payments, cancellations and plan changes are worth nothing as evidence if the only path to them runs through the client.
Inqetra’s answer
Yes — an authenticated POST to /v1/events, with keys scoped to one site. 3 per site on Pro, unlimited on Scale.
The plaintext key is shown exactly once; only a SHA-256 of it is stored.
What can’t it do?
The most useful answer any vendor can give, and the one you will almost never find on a pricing page. Every real architecture trades something away.
Inqetra’s answer
It cannot follow a person across days. The salt is gone by morning, so there is no cohort retention and no returning-visitor curve.
It cannot recompute uniqueness under a different grouping, because the flag was written under one.
It cannot be self-hosted. The repository is private and grants no licence.
Long ranges are slower than short ones, and labelled so.
Take them anywhere. If another product answers one of these better than this one does, that is worth knowing before you install something rather than after — how Inqetra counts sets out the mechanism behind every answer above, with the file named beside each claim.
Or just try it for a fortnight
One site, thirty days of history, no card. The answers above are checkable either way.
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