Plausible visitors in your MacBook notch

Notch Metrics2 min read

Plausible is a single page that loads instantly and tells you everything. It is still a page, and you still have to go to it.

How do you watch Plausible without the dashboard?

Notch Metrics puts the figures in the MacBook notch. Collapsed, a thin strip. Hover the camera housing and it expands over whatever you were doing. Move away and it folds back to the shape it had.

What Plausible reports

Number What it is
Unique visitors Distinct people, counted without a cookie
Pageviews Every page load, repeats included
Sessions Visits started in the window
Bounce rate Sessions with one pageview, as a fraction

The cookieless count, and what it costs

Plausible identifies a visitor by hashing the IP address with the user agent and a daily rotating salt. No cookie, nothing stored on the device, and in most of Europe no consent banner.

The trade is worth understanding. The hash rotates daily, so somebody who visits on Monday and again on Tuesday is two visitors over a two-day window, not one. Over long windows a unique visitor count sits closer to a visit count than to a count of people.

That is a privacy decision rather than a measurement failure, and it is the right one. It just means the number does not mean quite what the label says.

Timezone is the site's

Daily buckets follow the timezone set on the Plausible site, not on your Mac. That keeps the notch and your Plausible dashboard agreeing, which matters more than agreeing with your laptop clock.

Connecting

A Plausible API key and the site id, which is the domain as Plausible knows it. What the Plausible connector asks for.

The key is encrypted on the server with a key unique to that one connection, so the Mac app never holds it. The connector is marked beta: it connects and returns figures, and the edges are still being worked on.

Self-hosted Plausible

The connector targets Plausible Cloud. A self-hosted instance lives on your own domain, which the hosted connector does not reach. If that is you, a custom metric covers it: one JavaScript module declaring your host, running on your own Mac.

Alongside everything else

Revenue from Stripe and Polar, search from Search Console, product analytics from PostHog. Every source.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 and later. Seven days with no card, then $9 a month or $49 a year. Download Notch Metrics.

  • plausible
  • analytics
  • mac

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Questions

How do I see Plausible visitors on my Mac?
Install Notch Metrics, connect Plausible on the web with an API key and your site id, and place the visitors widget in the MacBook notch. Hover the camera housing and the figure is there.
How does Plausible count unique visitors without cookies?
By hashing the IP address with the user agent and a daily rotating salt. Nothing is stored on the device. Because the salt rotates daily, somebody who visits on two days counts as two visitors over a two-day window.
Which timezone do Plausible daily figures use?
The timezone configured on the Plausible site, not the one your Mac is set to. That keeps the notch and the Plausible dashboard agreeing about which day a number belongs to.
Does Notch Metrics work with self-hosted Plausible?
The built-in connector targets Plausible Cloud. For a self-hosted instance, write a custom metric: one JavaScript module that declares your own host and runs on your Mac.
Is my Plausible API key stored on my Mac?
No. It is encrypted on the server with a key unique to that one connection. The Notch Metrics server calls Plausible and sends your Mac a normalised number.