Clicktag: a free Vercel Analytics alternative with custom events

Vercel Web Analytics includes 50,000 events a month on the Hobby plan, keeps a 1-month reporting window, and pauses collection when you reach the limit. Custom events need a paid plan, and on Pro, UTM parameters need the Web Analytics Plus add-on at $10 per month per team. Clicktag is a free alternative that gives you custom events, UTM reports, up to 50 goals per site and Stats API ranges of up to 400 days with one 4 KB script tag.

Vercel Web Analytics limits and pricing

Vercel prices Web Analytics by collected events. On the Hobby plan, you get 50,000 events per month, and Hobby teams can't buy more: once you reach the limit, collection pauses.

The Hobby plan has a 1-month reporting window and does not support custom events or UTM parameters.

Vercel Pro has no included events. On Pro, you pay $0.03 per 1,000 collected events, your reporting window extends to 12 months, and you can send custom events with up to 2 properties each. If you want UTM parameters on Pro, a 24-month reporting window or 8 properties per custom event, you also need the Web Analytics Plus add-on at $10 per month per team. Enterprise pricing is custom, with a 24-month reporting window.

Vercel Hobby pauses data collection at 50,000 monthly events and does not include custom events or UTM reports.

Netlify ties analytics to its plans as well. It offers a Free plan with 300 credits per month, a Personal plan at $9 per month with 1,000 credits and 1-day observability, and a Pro plan at $20 per month with 30-day analytics and metrics and credit tiers from 3,000 to 20,000. Netlify's Web Analytics charts offer 30-day, 7-day and 24-hour filters.

Vercel Hobby vs Vercel Pro vs Clicktag

Prices and limits checked on October 29, 2026, on each vendor's official pricing or help pages.

What you get with Clicktag on a Vercel site

Clicktag is free, requires no credit card, and has no paid plan today. Every feature is included on every account, for up to 50 websites per account.

Instead of upgrading your hosting plan to see campaign data or button clicks, you get:

• Custom event tracking from the browser with window.tt_event(name, metadata, callback) or from a server route with a JSON POST to /events using no API key.
• UTM tracking for utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign right in your main reports, alongside referrers, pages, entry pages, countries, devices, browsers and operating systems.
• Up to 50 goals per site, including multi-step funnels of 2 to 6 steps completed in order on the same UTC day, with conversion rates and median and p90 time to convert.
• Google Search Console integration that backfills up to 16 months of query data and refreshes the trailing 10 days every 6 hours.
• AI traffic sources separated cleanly so visits from ChatGPT (utm_source=chatgpt.com), Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot show up as their own sources.
• Privacy by default: Clicktag sets no cookies, uses no local storage and never stores IP addresses. Visitors are counted with a daily salted SHA-256 hash whose salt is deleted shortly after each UTC day ends.

You can explore the dashboard before signing up in the public demo, which runs on synthetic numbers.

Adding Clicktag to a Next.js site on Vercel

Clicktag does not use an npm package. You load one async script (latest.js, about 4 KB compressed) in your root layout. It hooks window.history.pushState and popstate automatically, so client-side transitions in the Next.js App Router count as pageviews without extra routing code.

1. Copy your site tag

Sign in at clicktag.app with a Google account, add your domain, and go to Site settings > Installation. Copy the script tag containing your data-hostname and data-verify attributes.

2. Add the script to app/layout.tsx

Paste the raw <script> tag inside the <body> of your root layout in app/layout.tsx:

export default function RootLayout({
  children,
}: {
  children: React.ReactNode;
}) {
  return (
    <html lang="en">
      <body>
        {children}
        <script
          async
          src="https://clicktag.io/latest.js"
          data-hostname="example.com"
          data-verify="YOUR_SITE_VERIFY_TOKEN"
        />
      </body>
    </html>
  );
}

Deploy to Vercel. Because Next.js renders the <script> tag into the initial HTML sent by the server, Clicktag can verify ownership of your site automatically from the data-verify token on your homepage. The installation docs cover strict Content Security Policy setups, and the Sites API docs cover the manual fallback when the tag is not in the served HTML.

3. Fire a custom event

Once latest.js is in your layout, call window.tt_event from any client handler, or post to /events from a Next.js Route Handler or Server Action. Because Clicktag stores event metadata without grouping or filtering by it in reports, put the value you want to compare directly into the event name (up to 256 characters), like signup_pro_plan or download_cli_mac.

Clicktag or Vercel Web Analytics: which to pick

Pick Clicktag if you want custom events, UTM parameters, goals and funnels without per-event pricing: free for up to 50 websites, with Stats API ranges up to 400 days. Vercel's Hobby plan keeps 1 month of reporting and pauses at 50,000 events.

Vercel Web Analytics fits if all you need is traffic numbers inside the Vercel dashboard you already use, across unlimited projects on every plan.

FAQ

How does Clicktag handle custom event properties compared to Vercel?

Vercel Pro lets you attach 2 properties per custom event, and Web Analytics Plus allows 8. Clicktag accepts an event name up to 256 characters and a metadata object up to 4,096 characters, but metadata cannot be grouped or filtered in reports or the API, so you should encode variations into the event name itself.

Does Clicktag record clicks and file downloads automatically?

No. The latest.js script tracks pageviews and single-page app route changes automatically, but it does not record clicks, outbound links, file downloads or form submissions on its own. You add a window.tt_event call for each action you want to track, as shown in the custom events documentation.

Are all five UTM parameters reported in Clicktag?

Clicktag reports utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, and prefers utm_source over source, ref and the referring host when attributing a visit. It does not report utm_term or utm_content as report dimensions.

Will local Next.js development pollute my production stats?

If you leave data-hostname set to your production domain while running localhost:3000, the script will send local hits to your live site because latest.js has no built-in localhost exclusion. Render the script tag only in production, or omit data-hostname locally so the collector ignores the unregistered localhost:3000 host.

What features does Clicktag leave out?

Clicktag does not report bounce rate, and it has no session recordings, heatmaps, A/B tests, feature flags, revenue or ecommerce tracking, individual visitor profiles, Google Analytics import or white labeling. It is a hosted service, not open source and not self-hostable.