Best offer on record: 30-Day Free Trial (no credit card). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
30-Day Free Trial (no credit card) high confidence
Free 30-day trial of Plausible Cloud. During the trial you get access to ALL Business-plan features and limits (funnels, user journeys, revenue tracking, custom properties, Stats API, Data Studio). No credit card required to start. Not a permanent free tier: at the end of the trial you must pick a paid plan (from ~$9/mo Starter / ~€9 per site at 10k pageviews) to keep the data. The pageview tier you land on is chosen from your last 30 days of billable usage.
Eligibility
Universal — open to anyone (students, startups, general). No .edu email required, no startup-age or funding cap, no region limit stated. Credit card NOT required to start.
How to claim
1) Sign up at plausible.io -> a 30-day trial starts automatically, no card. 2) Install the tracking snippet and run real traffic. 3) Check usage near the end of the 30 days. 4) Choose a paid plan at trial end to continue (or don't and lose access).
Expiry
Each trial lasts 30 days from signup; then paid. No fixed program sunset.
Gotchas
This is a TRIAL, not a free-forever tier. Auto-conversion to paid at day 30. Trial-to-plan tier is based on your actual 30-day usage, so heavy test traffic can put you in a pricier band. Overage rule: 1 month over a cap = no action; 2 consecutive months over = Plausible asks you to upgrade and can lock dashboards after ~1 week (data collection continues).
15% Nonprofit / Education / Open-Source Discount high confidence
15% off a Business plan on ANNUAL billing only, stacked on top of the 2-months-free annual-billing saving. Applies to NEW Business annual subscriptions; it continues on renewals for as long as you stay on the same plan. Excludes existing subscriptions, monthly billing, and every non-Business plan (so the floor is ~$19/mo at 10k pageviews, not free).
Eligibility
ONLY nonprofits, educational institutions, and open-source projects. This is an INSTITUTIONAL discount, NOT an individual-student discount (no .edu-email route, no SheerID, no student portal). A student's own project realistically qualifies via the open-source arm, not the 'educational institution' arm. Startups have NO dedicated arm; they can only qualify through an open-source project. No funding cap stated. Claimed by email, not self-serve.
How to claim
1) Start the free 30-day trial (no CC). 2) Choose the Business pageview tier you need with ANNUAL billing. 3) Email hello@plausible.io with your org/project name, type, website, and preferred Business tier. 4) Plausible reviews and sends a discount code to use at checkout.
Expiry
No stated sunset; discount persists across renewals on the same Business annual plan and ends immediately if you change plan/billing.
Gotchas
Only 15% off, NOT free, and only on Business + annual. Plan upgrade/downgrade ends the discount and reverts to regular pricing. No .edu verification or formal proof is documented — it is a manual email review, so approval is at Plausible's discretion and not guaranteed. Open-source / startup claims are the weaker interpretation and may be declined.
Self-Hosted Community Edition (AGPL, free) high confidence
Plausible's open-source Community Edition is free to self-host: unlimited sites and visitors, no pageview cap, no subscription. You pay only for your own server/hosting. This is the genuinely zero-cost SaaS route for a student or startup on a zero budget (a free-tier VPS credit from a cloud provider can cover the host too). The paid hosted Plausible Cloud (from ~$9/mo per site at 10k pageviews) is a separate product.
Eligibility
Anyone can self-host — no student/startup restriction, no .edu email, no funding cap, no region limit. You must operate your own server + PostgreSQL and accept the AGPL license (copyleft applies if you modify and distribute).
How to claim
1) Provision a VPS (use a student/free-tier cloud credit if available). 2) Deploy the Plausible Community Edition (Docker image + Postgres) per the self-host docs. 3) Point each site's tracking snippet at your own instance. No Plausible account or payment needed.
Expiry
Indefinite (open source under AGPL); no expiration. Individual releases ship but the free self-host offer has no end date.
Gotchas
You absorb 100% of hosting cost plus all ops/maintenance/backups. No vendor support; bot filtering and scale are yours. This is free SOFTWARE, not a free offer from Plausible — the hosted cloud product is paid and has no free tier.
No dedicated free "student tier," no free "startup program," and no individual-student "education license" exists at Plausible. The only genuinely free / discounted items are (a) the universal 30-day no-CC trial, (b) the 15% nonprofit/edu/open-source discount which is institutional and applies to a Business plan on annual billing only, and (c) the free self-hosted AGPL Community Edition. There is NO free hosted (Plausible Cloud) tier. Plausible is a self-funded, bootstrapped, investor-free company, so it runs no startup-accelerator-style free program for customers; startups are not a targeted free segment (at most reachable via the open-source arm of the 15% discount). Nothing was sunset in 2025-2026: the 30-day trial (no CC), the 15% edu/nonprofit/OSS discount, and the free Community Edition are all current as of this 2026-10-22 check. Caveat: the WebSearch budget was exhausted during this run, so all findings above are based on reading the official plausible.io documentation pages directly today; third-party price trackers (outmano/comparedge/canivibecodeit) corroborate the $9/mo Starter floor and no-free-tier claim but were not independently re-verified.