What you can see in analytics on Free, and what Starter adds
Full analytics starts at Starter. Here is what you can still work out on Free, what you are missing, and the point where the gap starts costing you money.
You are on the free plan, the storefront is live, three or four things have sold, and you would like to know why. Which product people actually look at. Whether the TikTok link is doing anything. Whether last Tuesday was a fluke. Full analytics begins at Starter, so the useful question is not "should I upgrade" but "what can I work out without it, and when does guessing start to cost me more than the plan".
Two different questions
There is a difference between knowing what happened and knowing why. What happened is never in doubt on any plan: orders arrive, your customer list grows with every purchase and every free download, and your Stripe account holds every payment down to the penny. Nobody needs an analytics screen to count sales.
Why it happened is the harder question, and that is what per-product views and traffic sources answer. Without them you know that the £39 course sold twice last week. With them you know that it was seen 210 times to get those two sales, while the £12 template sold three times off 40 views, which is a completely different story about which product page is doing its job.
The genuinely hard part on Free is not the missing numbers, it is the temptation to invent them. You remember posting on a Thursday and a sale arriving on a Friday and you build a theory. Six weeks later the theory is a strategy, and it was never based on anything. Working by hand is fine. Working by memory is not.
Counting by hand, or reading the screen
You can run a small storefront on Free for a long time without flying blind, as long as you accept that some of the counting is manual. Here is the honest comparison — plans do change, so check the current split on the pricing page before you plan around it.
| Working it out by hand on Free | With full analytics from Starter |
|---|---|
| You count orders from your customer list and Stripe | The same totals are on one screen, already summed |
| Views are unknown, so conversion is unknowable | Views, buyers and revenue sit next to each other per product |
| You guess where traffic came from | Traffic source is recorded for you |
| Comparing two products means two spreadsheets | Products sit in one list you can rank |
| Launch weeks blur into normal weeks | The shape of a week is visible without recall |
| "Is the page or the price wrong?" is a coin flip | High views with no buyers points at the page; low views points at the traffic |
How to run a useful week on Free
This is a manual substitute, not a replacement. It takes about ten minutes on a Sunday and it will keep you honest until the numbers are big enough to justify a paid plan.
- 1Open a plain spreadsheet with five columns: week, what I published, orders, revenue, notes.
- 2Every Sunday, export the customer list to CSV — that is on Free — and count the rows added since last Sunday.
- 3Break those rows down by product so you have a per-product order count, even without a per-product view count.
- 4Write down what you actually did that week: two posts, one email, a collaboration, nothing at all. This column is the one that explains the others later.
- 5Use one link per channel where you can, so the traffic question is at least partly answered by which link people used.
- 6After six weeks, sort by orders and read the notes column for the top three weeks. That is your first real finding.
When the gap starts costing money
Picture a storefront with three products: a £12 template, a £39 mini-course, and a £150 coaching call. In a given month you take nine orders and about £420. On Free you know that much. What you cannot see is that the coaching call was viewed 180 times and booked once, while the template was viewed 60 times and bought seven times. Those two facts point at completely different jobs: one is a page and price problem, the other is a traffic problem.
Guess wrong and you spend a month rewriting a page that was working. That wasted month is what the plan actually costs against, not the monthly fee in isolation. With per-product analytics the diagnosis takes about four minutes, and there is a 14-day trial, so you can see a fortnight of your own real numbers before you commit to anything.
Start on the free plan, build the storefront and the customer list, and add analytics when you actually have something to measure.
Create a free storeThe mistake most people make
The mistake runs in both directions. Some creators upgrade for analytics in week one, when they have eleven visitors and nothing to analyse, then cancel two months later having learnt nothing. Others stay on Free for a year with five products and no idea which one earns, making decisions on gut feel while the answer sits behind a plan that costs less than one sale of the mini-course. Analytics is worth paying for at the point where you have more than one product and a real decision to make about them, and not really before.
Yes. The link-in-bio page, unlimited link cards and the full storefront designer — 28 themes, 11 layouts, 16 fonts, cover photos — stay on Free, and the platform fee is 0% on every plan, Free included. Stripe's own card processing fees still apply.
Full CSV export of the customer list is on every plan, so yes. That is the backbone of the manual method described above.
Partly, and crudely: use a different link for each channel so you can tell them apart by which one was used. Proper traffic source reporting comes with full analytics from Starter, and Google Analytics integration is a Pro feature if you want to bring your own tooling.
That is a useful outcome and it usually is disappointing at first. A page seen 200 times with two sales is not a failure, it is a starting figure. Take the 14-day trial, write the numbers down, and judge the plan on whether it changed a decision, not on whether it made you feel good.
Free is not a demo, it is a working shop with a manual ledger. Starter swaps the ledger for a screen. Choose the moment based on what you are actually deciding — which product to build next, which page to rewrite, which channel to keep posting to — and not on the feeling that you ought to have more charts. If you want the wider picture of what sits on each tier, the features overview lays it out.
Open the free account first, sell something small, and let the numbers tell you when to upgrade.
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