Metricward is EU-hosted analytics for teams that need real answers about funnels, retention and behaviour, without sending a single visitor’s data outside Europe. Everything runs on a Swedish-hosted stack where IP addresses are never written to disk.
Free forever for 10,000 events/mo · no credit card
<script defer src="https://metricward.eu/mw.js"
data-project="prj_yours"></script>One line. About 2.2KB gzipped. No cookies by default.
The trade-off everyone else asks you to make
Your visitors’ data goes to a US advertising company. Your DPO knows. Your enterprise customers’ security reviews ask about it, and the honest answer is uncomfortable.
Pageviews and referrers are a start. They will not tell you where your signup flow breaks, which cohort of customers actually comes back, or which change moved the needle.
One for traffic, one for behaviour, one for revenue, a spreadsheet to join them together, and a monthly argument about which number is the real one.
Metricward exists because that trade-off is a choice somebody made, not a law of physics. Deep analysis and strict privacy are compatible if you design for both from the first line of the ingestion pipeline.
What you get
Where people come from, what they read, and what they do when they arrive. Real time, no sampling, and no minimum thresholds hiding your smallest segments.
Funnels that show exactly which step loses people, counted in people and not only percentages, and measured from the first step so the rate cannot be flattered. Retention cohorts beside them, with periods that have not happened yet left blank rather than shown as zero.
Identified users, the accounts they belong to, and how much of your traffic is identified at all. Coverage is stated before any user count, because a user total measured over mostly anonymous sessions gets repeated as the customer count.
Money per currency, never converted and never added together, because a total needs an exchange rate with a date and a source. Attribution is single-touch and the screen says so rather than footnoting it.
Filter every screen by country, device, campaign or any custom property you send. Type country==SE;device_type==mobile and the entire product follows you.
A live event debugger showing every decision the pipeline made, and a tracking plan that flags an event which no longer matches its contract instead of dropping it. Analytics you do not trust is worse than none at all.
One limitation, stated here rather than discovered later. Customers, Revenue and multi-day retention all need something a browser event does not carry: a trusted user id or an amount in cents. The server-side endpoint that would carry them is specified and not shipped, so today those screens are empty and say why, instead of showing zeroes. Traffic, funnels, segments, the debugger and the exports do not depend on it and work now. What is and is not built.
The part that is actually different
Your visitors' IP addresses have nowhere to be stored.
We use them in memory to work out a country and a daily hash, and then they are gone. There is no column for them in any table.
The hash key is destroyed every 24 hours.
Yesterday’s identifiers cannot be reversed. Not by us, and not by anyone who ever gets hold of our database.
Cross-site tracking is not banned here. It is impossible.
Every project has its own hashing key, so the same visitor on two Metricward-tracked sites produces two unrelated identifiers with no key that could ever join them.
Query strings are filtered by an allowlist.
?email= and ?token= never reach our servers. Not redacted afterwards. Never received in the first place.
You choose how long we keep anything.
Three months to three years, set per project, with the real deletion date shown in your settings and a background job that actually enforces it.
Deletion produces a receipt.
Row counts before, row counts after, and a job id. That is evidence rather than reassurance, and you can hand it to whoever asked.
What we will not tell you: that any of this makes you compliant, or that cookieless tracking automatically removes your need for a consent banner. Both are questions for your counsel, and any vendor answering them for you in a marketing page is selling something.
At a glance
How it compares
A table where one product wins every row is read as marketing and believed on nothing. So here are the rows we lose as well as the ones we win.
| Metricward | GA4 | Plausible | Mixpanel | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EU-hosted | Yes, Sweden | No | Yes | EU region |
| European ownership | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Cookieless option | Yes, by default | Limited | Yes | No |
| Funnels | Yes | Yes | Basic | Best in class |
| Retention cohorts | Yes | Limited | No | Best in class |
| Segments on custom properties | Yes | Yes | Limited | Yes |
| Data-quality tooling | Yes | No | No | Partial |
| Session replay | On the roadmap | No | No | Yes |
| Google Ads integration | No | Yes | No | No |
| Free tier | 10k events | Free product | Trial only | Free plan, capped |
Google Analytics is free and it integrates with Google Ads. If your business runs on Google Ads, keep it, and run Metricward alongside for the questions GA4 cannot answer.
For the person installing it
Principles
We will not sell your data, or anyone's.
Not aggregated, not anonymised, not as an industry benchmark. There is no second business model hiding behind this one.
We will not build advertising profiles.
No cross-customer identity graph exists, and the per-project salt means one could not be built even if somebody wanted it.
We will not fingerprint devices.
No canvas, no WebGL, no font enumeration, no audio context. Not for analytics, and not for fraud prevention either.
We will not present a guess as a measurement.
Every number is labelled as observed, calculated, modelled or generated, and anything modelled shows its confidence and its inputs.
We will not make retention a dark pattern.
Downgrade or cancel and your data stays for your retention window. We do not hold history hostage to a subscription.
We will not claim compliance on your behalf.
We are a processor. Compliance is a property of your organisation, and we will give you the evidence rather than the reassurance.
From the team behind Formward
Formward is our EU-hosted form backend. Point an HTML form at it and it catches the submission, filters the spam, emails you and stores it in Sweden, with no server code of your own.
Metricward answers the other half of the question. Formward tells you that somebody filled in your form. Metricward tells you how they found you, what they read first, where the other visitors gave up, and whether the ones who converted came back.
They share a team, a hosting stack in Sweden and the same standards about visitor data. They do not share a database, a bill or an account. Use either one on its own and you will never notice the other exists.
Visit formward.euTogether
Pricing
Free
€0/mo
10 000 events
1 project
3 months of history
Starter
€19/mo
200 000 events
3 projects
12 months of history
Professional
€59/mo
1 000 000 events
10 projects
24 months of history
Business
€169/mo
5 000 000 events
30 projects
36 months of history
Bot traffic is never billed. Annual billing is two months free. The usage meter sits in the app from your first day, so the invoice is never the first time you hear about it. Full pricing
FAQ
Do I still need a cookie banner?
Possibly. It depends on your configuration and on your national regulator, and anyone who answers that question with a flat no is selling you something. In cookieless mode we store nothing on the visitor's device and never store IP addresses, which is the strongest technical position available. Whether that removes your consent obligation is a question for your counsel, not for a marketing page.
Will my numbers match Google Analytics?
No, and neither tool is wrong. We count sessions differently, we filter bots more aggressively, we do not sample, and we do not model the gaps. Expect Metricward to show more traffic than a consent-gated GA4 property, often 10 to 40 percent more.
Is my data really in the EU?
Yes. Events and account data sit on servers in Sweden and backups are encrypted and stored in Sweden. Every subprocessor is named with its location on our subprocessors page. One of them, MaxMind, is a US company, and it receives nothing: the geographic database is a file on our own servers and no address is ever sent to it. No part of the pipeline sends visitor data outside Europe.
Do I need to change my site to install it?
One script tag. The browser SDK is about 2.2KB gzipped with zero dependencies, it never blocks your page, and it never throws into your code. You can also self-host the script on your own domain and proxy the endpoint through your own origin. An npm package is planned and is not published yet.
What happens when I hit my plan limit?
There is a 10 percent grace period, and only then does collection pause. Nothing already collected is ever deleted. The usage meter is in the app from your first day, which is where you will see it coming: email delivery is not wired yet, so no warning lands in your inbox. Downgrading works the same way: it stops collection above the new allowance and hides gated reports, and your history stays queryable for your whole retention window.
Can Metricward staff see my analytics?
Not by default and not without you knowing. There is no standing access for anyone. Support access has to be granted by you, expires within 24 hours, and appears in your own audit log with the name of the person who had it.
Do you use my data to train AI models?
No. Not aggregated, not anonymised, not to improve the service. Your data is yours and it is not a training set.
Is there a free plan?
Yes, and it is a product rather than a trial. 10,000 events a month, one project, three months of history, no credit card and no expiry date.
How is this different from Formward?
Formward is a form backend: it catches your form submissions, filters spam and routes them. Metricward tells you what happened on your site before and after that form. Same team, same EU hosting, same privacy standards, two separate products that each work perfectly well on their own.
Free forever on 10,000 events a month. Two minutes to install. No card, and no call with anybody.
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