Vemetric vs Wicked Reports in 2026: $5-a-month analytics versus $499-a-month ad attribution
Vemetric is an open-source, cookieless analytics tool that also detects AI-sourced traffic from ChatGPT. Wicked Reports is first-party ecommerce ad attribution built to separate new customers from repeat buyers, priced for brands already spending real money on Meta and Google.
Vemetric
Wicked Reports- Vemetric costs $0 to $5/month; Wicked Reports starts at $499/month, roughly a 100x difference in entry price for a genuinely different job.
- Vemetric automatically detects and attributes traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, showing which pages attract AI-sourced visitors and whether they convert differently; Wicked Reports has no equivalent AI-referral detection, its Attribution Time Machine matches sales to paid ad clicks, not organic AI citations.
- Wicked Reports separates new-customer attribution from repeat-buyer credit, filtering out the inflated ROAS that retargeting campaigns typically claim; Vemetric does not attempt ad attribution or new-versus-repeat customer segmentation at all.
- Vemetric is open-source and self-hostable, with 353+ stars on GitHub; Wicked Reports is a closed, hosted SaaS platform with no self-hosting option.
- Wicked Reports runs a weekly 5 Forces AI analysis that classifies every ad campaign as Scale, Chill, or Kill; Vemetric has no ad budget optimization feature, since it is a tracking and analytics tool rather than an ad decisioning engine.
- Wicked Reports' Advanced Signal feeds verified new-customer conversion data back to Meta via CAPI to retrain its ad algorithm; Vemetric has no comparable ad-platform signal integration, its AI detection is about your own site traffic, not feeding data back to ad platforms.
Vemetric and Wicked Reports sit at opposite ends of the analytics market by price and by purpose. Vemetric is a free-to-$5-a-month, open-source web and product analytics tool built for early-stage teams who want cookieless tracking and, notably, automatic detection of traffic arriving from AI tools like ChatGPT. Wicked Reports starts at $499 a month and does one specific job for ecommerce brands with real ad budgets: figuring out which campaigns bring in new customers versus which ones are just claiming credit for repeat buyers who would have purchased anyway. Neither tool is trying to be the other. The comparison is useful mainly for understanding which problem you actually have.
The tools at a glance
Vemetric
Open-source, privacy-first analytics combining web traffic and product analytics in one cookieless platform.
Vemetric's pitch is unusually direct for analytics software: web analytics and product analytics in one tool, cookieless and GDPR compliant by default, for $5 a month with unlimited projects and unlimited seats. Most teams run one tool for marketing site traffic and a separate one for in-app product behavior; Vemetric tracks both in the same dashboard, including the moment an anonymous visitor becomes an identified account.
The feature that stands out most is automatic AI referral detection. Vemetric identifies and attributes traffic arriving from AI tools like ChatGPT without any configuration, so you can see which pages attract AI-sourced visitors and whether those visitors convert at a different rate than organic or direct traffic. It is a traffic-log-level signal, not a measure of whether your brand is actually being mentioned inside AI-generated answers, but it is a real and unusually early feature for a tool this cheap.
The tradeoffs match the price. The free tier caps out at 2,500 events and one month of retention, the integration ecosystem is thinner than Plausible or Fathom, and it is a single-founder product still building out documentation. The codebase is open-source on GitHub with 353-plus stars, and self-hosting is a supported option for teams that need full data sovereignty rather than trusting a third party at any price.
| Feature | Free $0/mo | Professional From $5/mo |
|---|---|---|
| Events per month | 2,500 | 10,000+ |
| Projects | 2 | Unlimited |
| Team seats | 2 | Unlimited |
| Data retention | 1 month | 5 years |
| User journeys and funnels | Yes | Yes |
| AI referral detection | Yes | Yes |
Wicked Reports
First-party attribution that shows which ads bring new customers, not just clicks.
Wicked Reports exists to fix a specific lie that platform-reported ROAS tells: retargeting campaigns get credit for purchases from people who were already going to buy, which makes acquisition spend look worse than it is and retention spend look better than it is. Wicked separates first-time buyer conversions from repeat purchases at the attribution level, using first-party click data rather than platform pixels, so the ROAS number reflects who is actually a new customer.
The Attribution Time Machine matches a sale back to the original ad click even if that click happened weeks or months earlier, which matters for higher-consideration purchases that do not convert inside a standard 7-day attribution window. Advanced Signal then feeds that verified new-customer data back to Meta through CAPI, which is meant to retrain Meta's algorithm to find more people who resemble genuine new buyers rather than repeat purchasers.
Every week, 5 Forces AI runs an automated analysis of all campaigns against verified new-customer ROI and labels each one Scale, Chill, or Kill, turning what used to be a manual dashboard audit into a prioritized action list. Pricing scales with annual revenue starting at $499 a month for the Measure tier, and 5 Forces AI plus Advanced Signal are add-ons at $199 a month each below the Maximize plan, so the fully loaded feature set effectively starts closer to $999 a month.
| Feature | Measure $499/mo | Scale $699/mo | Maximize $999/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| FunnelVision & Cohort Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Lifetime lookback/lookforward | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API access | No | Yes | Yes |
| 5 Forces AI (weekly budget AI) | Add-on +$199/mo | Add-on +$199/mo | Yes |
| Advanced Signal Meta CAPI | Add-on +$199/mo | Add-on +$199/mo | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Vemetric | Wicked Reports |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use case | Combined web analytics and product analytics | First-party ad attribution for ecommerce new-customer acquisition |
| Pricing model | Flat subscription, unlimited projects and seats on Professional | Priced by annual revenue tier, from $499/month |
| Cookieless / first-party approach | Yes, cookieless and GDPR compliant by design | Yes, first-party click tracking, iOS-proof by design |
| AI referral traffic detection | Yes, auto-detects and attributes ChatGPT-sourced traffic | No AI referral traffic detection |
| New-customer vs repeat-buyer attribution | No | Yes, Attribution Time Machine and new-customer filtering |
| Product analytics (funnels, user journeys) | Yes (funnels, user journeys, custom events) | No |
| Automated ad budget allocation | No | Yes, 5 Forces AI gives weekly Scale/Chill/Kill recommendations (Maximize plan or add-on) |
| Open-source / self-hostable | Yes, open-source on GitHub with 353+ stars, self-hosting supported | No |
| API access | Yes | Yes, from Scale plan up |
| Meta CAPI / ad platform signal integration | No | Yes, Advanced Signal Meta CAPI integration |
| Free tier / trial | Yes, free tier with no credit card required | No free tier; pricing starts at $499/month |
| Starting price | $0/mo (Free), $5/mo (Professional) | $499/mo |
Considering AI Peekaboo alongside Vemetric and Wicked Reports?
Vemetric's AI Referral Detection tells you that a visitor arrived from ChatGPT, which page they landed on, and whether they converted, but it stops at the traffic log; it cannot tell you whether ChatGPT is actually mentioning your brand in the answers it generates, or how you compare to competitors inside those answers. Wicked Reports does not track AI referral traffic at all, its Attribution Time Machine is built around ad clicks, not organic AI citations. AI Peekaboo closes that gap: it tracks where your brand actually appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, including competitor share-of-voice, with a read and write API and white-label delivery on every plan starting at $50 a month. If Vemetric's AI referral numbers made you curious about what is actually being said about your brand in those AI answers, AI Peekaboo answers that question directly.
Read the AI Peekaboo review →Which should you choose?
VemetricWicked ReportsVemetricWicked ReportsVemetricWicked ReportsThese two are not substitutes for each other under any real scenario. Vemetric is a cheap, open-source way to see who visits your site and how they use your product, with a genuinely useful AI-traffic detection feature bolted on. Wicked Reports is a specialized, expensive tool that only makes sense once you are spending enough on Meta and Google ads that a wrong attribution read is costing you real money. If you are choosing between them because of price alone, that is a sign you have not yet reached the ad spend where Wicked Reports' cost is justified, and Vemetric, or nothing beyond it, is the right call for now.
Bottom line
Run Vemetric if you want cheap, privacy-first analytics that also happens to flag AI-sourced traffic, and you are not yet running enough paid acquisition spend to need dedicated attribution software; at $5 a month there is no real reason not to. Move to Wicked Reports only once you are spending $30,000 or more a month on Meta or Google ads and you genuinely suspect retargeting campaigns are getting credit for sales that would have happened anyway, since below that spend level the $499-to-$999 monthly cost is hard to justify against what it saves. The two solve different problems well enough that using Vemetric for site and product analytics while a growing brand later adds Wicked Reports for ad attribution is a perfectly reasonable path, not an either/or decision.
Frequently asked questions
Does Vemetric track AI search visibility the way a tool like AI Peekaboo does?
No, not in the same sense. Vemetric's AI referral detection tells you when a visitor arrived at your site from a tool like ChatGPT and which page they landed on, which is a traffic-log signal. It does not tell you whether your brand is actually being mentioned or recommended inside ChatGPT's answers before that click happens, a different measurement problem that a dedicated AI visibility tool like AI Peekaboo is built to answer.
Can Wicked Reports detect traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT?
No, Wicked Reports has no AI referral traffic detection. Its Attribution Time Machine and first-party click tracking are built around matching purchases to paid ad clicks on platforms like Meta and Google, not around identifying or attributing organic traffic from AI assistants.
Is Vemetric a real substitute for a dedicated ad attribution tool like Wicked Reports?
No. Vemetric tracks web and product analytics, pageviews, user journeys, funnels, and events, but it does not do ad attribution, does not separate new customers from repeat buyers, and has no ad-platform signal integration. Wicked Reports is built specifically to solve the new-customer attribution problem that Vemetric does not attempt to address.
Why is Wicked Reports so much more expensive than Vemetric?
Wicked Reports is priced for the value it claims to unlock: correcting inflated retargeting ROAS and improving new-customer acquisition efficiency for brands already spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on paid ads, where a percentage-point improvement in accuracy is worth far more than the $499-to-$999 monthly fee. Vemetric is priced as a lightweight analytics tool for teams that have not yet reached that spend level, a fundamentally cheaper problem to solve.
Is Vemetric's open-source, self-hosted option relevant for an ecommerce brand considering Wicked Reports?
Generally no, they solve different problems. Vemetric's self-hosting appeals to teams that need full control over web and product analytics data for privacy or compliance reasons. Wicked Reports is a hosted SaaS attribution platform with no self-hosting option, and brands choosing it are typically prioritizing accurate new-customer ROAS over data sovereignty.
What is the 5 Forces AI and does Vemetric have anything similar?
5 Forces AI is Wicked Reports' weekly analysis that classifies every ad campaign as Scale, Chill, or Kill based on verified new-customer ROI, available on the Maximize plan or as a $199/month add-on. Vemetric has no comparable feature; it is a tracking and analytics tool, not a budget decisioning engine, so it will show you traffic and conversion data but will not recommend what to do with an ad budget.