# Tastatur — frequently asked questions

> Straight answers about consent banners, GDPR, what happens to visitor IP addresses, why cookieless visitor counts differ from Google Analytics, and when you need a data processing agreement.

Where the honest answer is "it depends" or "no", it says so.

## Do I need a cookie banner if I use Tastatur?

Tastatur sets no cookies on the site it measures and reads none there. Nothing is written to your visitors' devices at all — no localStorage, no sessionStorage, no IndexedDB. So there is nothing of ours for a consent banner to ask permission for.

In many EU and UK configurations that means Tastatur alone does not require a consent banner. It does not mean you can remove one: if any other tool on your site needs consent, you need the banner regardless of us, and the answer depends on your jurisdiction. Germany is the clearest example — TDDDG §25 has no audience-measurement exception, so the accurate position there is that we store nothing on the device and §25 is arguably not engaged at all, never that a banner can be dropped.

We will not tell you that you can skip the banner. Anyone who does is making a legal determination about your site that they are not in a position to make.

[What Tastatur collects](/privacy)

## Is Tastatur GDPR compliant?

No product can be. Compliance is a property of a controller's entire processing operation — your lawful basis, your notices, your retention, every other processor you use — and no tool can confer it on you by being installed. Any vendor claiming otherwise is selling you a badge, not a legal position.

What we can tell you is what is actually true and checkable. Tastatur sets no cookies and stores nothing on a visitor's device. The visitor identifier is scoped to one site and stops working within 24 hours, so there is no cross-site or cross-device profile. Geography resolves to a two-letter country code and no further. Raw IP addresses and user-agent strings are never written to the database, a log, or disk. Retention is yours to configure and is enforced by a job, not a promise. We will sign a data processing agreement. The whole thing is AGPL-3.0, so every one of those claims can be verified in the source rather than taken on trust.

There is also no certification to hold. No GDPR, CNIL or ICO approval exists for this category of product, and CNIL's evaluation tool is explicitly a self-assessment that states it does not assess overall compliance.

[What Tastatur collects](/privacy) · [Data processing agreement](/dpa)

## Does Tastatur collect personal data?

Yes, briefly, and anyone who tells you their analytics tool does not is describing something that cannot work. Your visitors' IP addresses reach our server, because every HTTP request on the internet carries one. An IP address is personal data under GDPR (Breyer, C-582/14) and is expressly listed as personal information under the CCPA.

What matters is what happens next. The IP and user-agent are used in memory for exactly two things — deriving a rotating digest and looking up a country code — and are then out of scope. Neither is written to the database, to a log, or to disk anywhere.

What is stored is a truncated HMAC that is scoped to one site and one 24-hour window, a page path with personal data stripped out of it, a referrer host, a country code, and four coarse facts about the browser. That is the whole of it, and none of it resolves to a person once the day's secret is destroyed.

[The full technical account](/privacy)

## What happens to my visitors' IP addresses?

They are combined with a user-agent, a site identifier and a secret that changes daily into an HMAC-SHA-256 digest truncated to 128 bits. The IP is then used once more to look up a two-letter country code — no region, no city, no coordinates, no network operator — and both it and the user-agent string go out of scope.

No visitor's IP address is ever persisted. It exists as a local variable while a request is served and nowhere else, which you can check: it happens in app/lib/ingest/identifier.rb, and the source is public.

One exception, stated here rather than buried. If you hold an account on this dashboard, we record the IP of your two most recent sign-ins so you can notice a login that was not you. That is about you as a customer, not about visitors to any site you measure.

[What Tastatur collects](/privacy) · [Privacy policy](/privacy-policy)

## How can you count returning visitors without cookies?

Within a single day, we can. A visitor's request is turned into a digest of their IP, user-agent and the site they are on, salted with a secret held only in memory. The same person loading a second page that day produces the same digest, so a visit holds together and a funnel works.

Across days, we cannot, and we do not pretend to. The secret is replaced every 24 hours and the old one destroyed from a store that never writes to disk, so yesterday's digests cannot be recomputed or matched by anyone — including us, including with the database in hand. Each site's secret rotates at midnight in that site's own timezone, so a day on your dashboard is a day where you are.

The honest characterisation is that data derived from a live salt is pseudonymous, not anonymous: while the secret exists the mapping is computable by whoever holds it. Once it is destroyed the link cannot be rebuilt and the data is unlinkable. We draw that distinction rather than describing the product as anonymous outright, because during the salt window that would not be true.

[Why the identifier stops working every day](/privacy)

## Why don't my numbers match Google Analytics?

They will not match, and neither figure is the truth. Ours is a good estimate rather than a census, and it is worth knowing which direction each difference pulls in before you go looking for a bug.

Visitor counts over more than a day are the big one. Because the identifier expires every 24 hours, a 30-day visitor figure here is the sum of 30 daily figures, not a count of distinct people. Someone who visits on five days is five visitors. A tool reporting cross-day uniques is keeping something durable on the device to do it.

In the other direction, a cookie-based tracker is refused outright by a large share of ad and tracker blockers, so it undercounts the technical end of your audience. Tastatur makes one first-party request and is blocked less often, but it is not unblockable and we make no claim that it is.

There are limits inherent to the method, too. Two people behind the same office NAT with the same browser version can collapse into one visitor; one person moving from wifi to cellular becomes two. And breakdown rows seen by fewer than your site's threshold of distinct visitors are withheld on purpose, so the rows in a table can sum to less than the total above it.

[What Tastatur collects](/privacy)

## Do you honour Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control?

Yes, by default, and in both places — the tracking script checks before it sends anything, and the server checks again before it records anything. If a visitor's browser sends either signal, no identifier is computed and no event is stored. Only an anonymous counter is incremented, so you can see that some requests opted out.

There is no per-person opt-out beyond that, and there structurally cannot be. Recording that one particular visitor has opted out would mean keeping a durable identifier for exactly the people who asked us not to. A browser header is the right mechanism here.

[Opting out](/privacy)

## Will ad blockers stop Tastatur from working?

Some will. Tastatur is not on the large tracker blocklists by default, because it does not do the thing those lists exist to block, but several lists take a broader view and block anything named like analytics.

You can reduce that by serving the script and the ingest endpoint from your own domain through a reverse proxy, which the documentation covers. We are not going to help you disguise it further than that. A visitor who has installed a blocker has expressed a preference, and a measurement tool that defeats it has picked the wrong side of its own argument.

[Documentation](/docs)

## Can I run Tastatur on my own server?

Yes. Tastatur is free software under the AGPL-3.0 and the hosted service runs the same code you can. A self-hosted install has no plans, no event ceiling and no Stripe — it is one environment variable, and the billing interface disappears entirely.

You bring PostgreSQL with the TimescaleDB extension and a Redis, and you own every row. Being able to read the source is also the only reason the privacy claims on this site are worth more than a promise: you do not have to believe that IP addresses are discarded, you can go and check.

[About](/about)

## Do I need a data processing agreement with you?

If you use the hosted service and GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, then yes — Article 28(3) requires a written contract wherever a processor handles personal data on a controller's behalf, and an IP address reaching our server is personal data. Ours is published and we will sign it.

If you self-host, you need no agreement with us at all. There is no separate processor: you run the software and you are the only party handling the data. You may well need agreements with your own hosting and email providers.

And if GDPR and UK GDPR do not apply to you, Article 28(3) does not bind you either. We would rather say that than let a conservative-sounding overstatement stand.

For measurement data the site owner is the controller and Tastatur is the processor. For account data — your email, your team, your billing — Tastatur is the controller. Both are true at once and the split matters.

[Data processing agreement](/dpa)

## What does Tastatur cost?

Free is 500,000 events a month across 1 site, with no card and no trial clock. Pro is $30 a month for 10,000,000 events across 20 sites.

Teammates are unlimited on every plan. Per-seat pricing on an analytics tool means the person who most needs to see the numbers is the person nobody wants to pay for, and the shared login that follows is worse for everyone.

There is no overage charge. Once an account passes its monthly allowance further events are not recorded, and the allowance resets on the first of the month — you will never get an invoice larger than the price above. You are emailed at 80% and again if it runs out. Downgrading never deletes anything.

Or pay nothing and self-host it, which has no limits at all.

[Pricing](/pricing)

## More

- [What Tastatur collects](/privacy) — the full technical account
- [Documentation](/docs.md) — install, custom events, the HTTP API. Also served as markdown.
- [About](/about)
- [Source code](https://github.com/streed/tastatur) — AGPL-3.0, self-hostable