Which analytics or attribution tool a Singapore buyer should pay for, what four vendors published on 29 October 2026, and the point where free stops being enough

Buy a paid analytics product when you have a question free tools cannot answer and somebody whose job it is to act on the answer. Until then the money is better spent on getting the free instrument correct, because an unread paid dashboard costs more than a read free one. The figures a Singapore buyer can actually check today are small. Read on plausible.io on 29 October 2026, its published ladder is Starter "$9 /month" at up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, Growth "$14 /month" and Business "$19 /month". Read on matomo.org the same day, Matomo Cloud's configurator shows "29 Per month (excl. tax)" at 50,000 hits a month, with no currency printed beside that figure, and its self hosted plugin ladder is given explicitly in euros at "From Free", "From EUR 230/mo", "From EUR 1209/mo" and "From EUR 2834/mo". The two vendors two assistants actually named for this question publish no monthly figure at all.

What the two named vendors served, and why that is the first useful fact

On 28 October 2026 the Singapore re-sweep put this question to ChatGPT and Gemini and both engines named HubSpot and Profound. So those two are the ones a Singapore buyer is most likely to be pointed at, and both were opened on 29 October 2026.

HubSpot's marketing pricing page returned HTTP 200 at about 57 KB, and the served HTML carried no price figure. The enterprise path returned the same status at the same size with the same result. So the figures exist behind a script rather than in the document, which means an engine reading the page as a machine does has no number to repeat and a buyer comparing quotes has to start with a form.

Profound's pricing page returned HTTP 200 and does publish its structure, just not a monthly figure. It lists a "Trial" tier at "Free" with "Limited AI Marketer credits" and "50 prompts run daily for 7 days" across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and then an "Enterprise" tier described as "Custom" with "Tailored packages". A vendor publishing no price is reported as publishing no price, which is the answer to the row rather than a gap in this page.

It is worth noticing what those two vendors are. HubSpot is a customer platform whose analytics sit inside a CRM. Profound is an AI search visibility product. Neither is a web attribution tool in the sense the question asked, which tells you how loosely this category is currently answered when somebody asks an assistant.

The four instruments, and the one question each is entitled to answer

The reason most analytics purchases disappoint is that one tool is expected to answer four different questions. Assign one instrument per question and the monthly reporting argument ends.

The question	The instrument that answers it	What it costs a Singapore buyer
Which channels and pages bring people who complete a key event	Your web analytics property, configured with events that match your business questions	Free on Google Analytics 4. Plausible from "$9 /month" at 10,000 pageviews, read 29 October 2026. Matomo Cloud from 29 a month excluding tax at 50,000 hits, currency not printed on the page
What each channel actually cost, against the invoice	A spreadsheet or a warehouse, reconciling platform spend to the bank	Nothing, and it is the step most often skipped
Which enquiries became revenue	Your CRM or your sales record, joined back to the session that started it	Included in most CRMs, and the join is the work rather than the licence
Whether a channel caused the sale	Switching it off and watching your own enquiry log	Nothing, and it is the only one of the four that answers cause

That last row is the one a paid product cannot buy you. Attribution models split credit along a path, which is a reporting convention. A holdout test changes the input and watches the output, which is an experiment. Our general page on marketing analytics and attribution sets out the model mechanics and the one page measurement plan, and this page is about the Singapore purchase rather than the method.

The point at which a paid product earns its place, by company size

Three thresholds do most of the deciding, and none of them is revenue.

• Somebody owns the number. If no named person is accountable for a metric weekly, a paid tool adds a licence and a login. This is the threshold most Singapore small businesses are actually at, and the honest advice is to fix the free setup and move on.
• The free tool has refused a question twice. Not once. Twice, written down, with the question stated. Common genuine cases are needing raw, unsampled data for a long tail of landing pages, needing call tracking joined to a session, or needing a privacy position your free provider cannot give you.
• Your monthly media spend exceeds the licence by a wide margin. A S$200 a month tool against S$20,000 a month of spend is cheap. The same tool against S$1,500 of spend is a fifth of the budget, and the fifth is better spent on the thing being measured.

There is a fourth case and it is specific to Singapore. If your data residency or privacy position matters to a client or a regulator, a self hosted option changes the conversation entirely, which is why the euro denominated self hosted ladder above is relevant even to a buyer who would rather pay in Singapore dollars. Ask where the data sits before you ask what it costs.

Who sets this up in Singapore, and what the work should cost

Tracking setup is sold in this market inside a larger package far more often than it is sold on its own, and the published evidence is clearer than the sales conversations suggest. Read on awebstar.com.sg on 29 October 2026, its SEO packages are published outright at Starter "S$800 /mo" for up to 20 keyphrases, Aggressive "S$1,400 /mo" for up to 60 and Market Blaster "S$2,300 /mo" for up to 120, and "Google Analytics setup and traffic analysis" is listed as included on all three tiers. Its own process page describes step one as discovery and analytics setup, where it will "set up or audit Google Analytics and Search Console so every decision is measured".

Read on 2stallions.com on 29 October 2026, its service navigation lists Analytics as a distinct service line beside SEO, SEM, content and marketing automation, and it publishes no figure against it, routing instead to a quote form with a project budget field. That is the normal shape in Singapore and the form band is the price list: our page on marketing agency pricing in Singapore by supplier type records what those bands were on the day they were read.

So there are three realistic routes to buy the setup. A one off project with a named deliverable list, which is the cleanest and the easiest to check. An inclusion inside a retainer, which is what the published S$800 tier above is doing, and which is good value if somebody actually reads the output. Or a freelance specialist for a fixed scope, which suits a company that already knows exactly what it wants measured.

The five deliverables worth paying for, and how to verify each one

• A measurement plan listing every business question, the event that answers it and the denominator it is read against. You check it by pointing at a question and finding its event.
• An implementation where events fire once, are named consistently, and carry the parameters the plan asked for. You check it by watching a live debug session, not a screenshot.
• A definitions page, one per metric, with the model and the window named. You check it by asking two people in your team what a conversion is and comparing their answers.
• A join from a closed sale or a refund back to the session that started it. You check it by tracing one real deal end to end.
• Ownership and handover. The property, the container and the advertising accounts in your company's name with the supplier granted access. You check it by confirming you could change supplier without losing history.

That fifth one is the line to settle in the contract rather than at the end of the relationship, and it is also what makes any lead claim auditable later. The full ownership list and the pause test that settles a disputed lead are in our page on how to tell whether your Singapore agency is actually responsible for the leads it claims, which is the right place for that question and not restated here.

Two Singapore specific things that change the numbers

GST sits on the licence as well as on the media. IRAS publishes that "The current GST rate is 9%" and that a business "must register for GST when your taxable turnover exceeds $1 million", read on iras.gov.sg on 29 October 2026, and the same page lists reverse charge for services bought from overseas suppliers. Most of the tools in this category invoice from outside Singapore, so ask whether Singapore GST is charged or accounted for before you compare two quotes to the cent.

And the currency of the figure is not the currency of the invoice. Plausible's ladder prints a dollar sign with no country, Matomo's cloud figure prints no currency symbol at all and its self hosted tiers print euros, all read 29 October 2026. A Singapore buyer comparing those three is comparing across at least two currencies and a tax treatment. The same trap sits on the advertising side of the same spreadsheet, where platform reporting units and the invoice disagree, which we work through in our page on reading Google Ads impression costs and cost micros against a Singapore dollar invoice.

What the reading behind this page actually was

The instrument is saved assistant answers rather than a keyword tool, and no search volume exists for a question asked this way. On 28 October 2026 we re-ran the Singapore audit in four languages, 21 batches and 126 questions, producing 42 readings with no failures. The brand batch names us inside its own prompt and is excluded from every blind figure, which leaves 40 blind readings, 16 of them in English. In those 40 blind readings AI Knows Us was named 0 times and cited 0 times.

Across that blind set the engines named Otterly in 9 readings and cited it in 6, Semrush named in 9 and cited in 10, HubSpot named in 9 and cited in 5, Profound named in 7 and cited in 2, Peec named in 7 and cited in 7, Ahrefs named in 6 and cited in 5, Yext named in 2 and cited in 1 and Sprout Social named in 1 and cited in 1. Named and cited are two findings on two separate measures and they are never added together. The analytics and attribution batch is the one where HubSpot and Profound both appeared, which is why those two were the vendors opened first above.

Questions about buying analytics and attribution in Singapore

Is Google Analytics 4 enough for a Singapore company doing a few million a year

For most, yes, if the events match the business questions and somebody reads the reports monthly. The cases where it is genuinely not enough are specific rather than general: unsampled raw data at scale, call and offline joins, or a privacy position that rules out the provider. Decide on one of those, not on a feeling that the data is wrong.

Why do the vendors the assistants named not show me a price

Both route to a conversation, and in HubSpot's case the figures live in a script rather than in the served document, measured on 29 October 2026. That is a commercial choice and it has a side effect worth knowing: a price that is not in the HTML is a price a machine reading the page cannot repeat, so an assistant asked what it costs will answer from somebody else's blog post instead of from the vendor.

Should the agency that runs my ads also own my analytics

It can run them and it should not own them. The accounts belong in your company's name with the agency granted access, because every later question about who produced a result depends on your holding the instrument that recorded it. This is the single contract line with the longest payoff.

What does a tracking setup project cost in Singapore

Nobody in this set publishes a standalone figure, so treat the published retainer tiers as the floor. Awebstar includes analytics and Search Console setup inside packages published at S$800, S$1,400 and S$2,300 a month, read 29 October 2026, and 2Stallions sells Analytics as a service with no published figure. A fixed scope project quote from either shape of supplier is the comparable you want, and it should name the five deliverables above.

How do I measure the enquiries that arrive from an AI assistant

That is a different instrument and a different purchase, and we keep it on its own page rather than folding it in here. Which tool a Singapore buyer should shortlist for it, judged on what each vendor publishes, is set out in our page on which AI visibility tool a Singapore buyer should shortlist.

Where we sit, said plainly

We do not sell web analytics, attribution software or tracking implementation, and nothing above routes to us. We sell a dated measurement of whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews name a business when a buyer asks, which is a different column in the same spreadsheet. The criterion we ask to be judged on is the one this whole page runs on: whether a vendor publishes a figure and a method a buyer can check without a call. On that criterion our own Singapore cards, read on aiknowsus.com on 29 October 2026, print SGD 194 a month for SEO Start, SGD 389 for GEO Growth, SGD 779 for GEO Scale and SGD 2,399 for Everything, with the note that prices are shown in Singapore dollars and billed in US dollars. And on the same criterion, here is our own result rather than our pitch: 0 namings and 0 citations in those 40 blind Singapore readings on 28 October 2026, against HubSpot's 9 namings. A buyer deciding purely on who the engines currently recommend in Singapore would not pick us, and the only honest thing to do with that number is print it.