I'm looking for an web analytics tool.
I really only care about how many people visit the site, and where from. Any other data would be nice just not needed.
Are there any free, and or cheap tools?
"cookie consent" is such a misnomer. It's actually about tracking.
https://www.iubenda.com/en/help/5525-cookies-gdpr-requirements#What-else-is-covered-by-the-Cookie-Law,-apart-from-cookies
matomo has a free self-hosted option. and it doesn't require js injection. if you don't need lots of metrics, it's able to parse some data from nginx/apache logs alone.
Self hosted matomo works well for me. Small site, I just want to have a bit of an idea about what is popular and where visitors come from. I've had it installed for ages and incremental updates work fine.
I hear that matomo can get resource heavy if your site draws large amounts of visitors. Which makes sense, but it might be something to take into account, and maybe install it on a separate (virtual) machine.
Personally, I self-host Plausible (plausible.io) and I'm really liking it. Slowly replacing google analytics with plausible across all my sites and apps.