Events

An event is the unit your usage is measured in, and two things produce one: a tracked visit on one of your sites, and a tracked signup. Nothing else in Chartsy counts. The detail worth knowing is that a visit is closer to a session than a pageview, so the number is usually far smaller than your pageview count.

Definition

Event - either one tracked visit on a website you have added to Chartsy, or one tracked signup. The two are counted separately and added together. Nothing else in the product is counted as an event.

Events are visits, not pageviews

For a visitor whose browser Chartsy is allowed to store a cookie on, a visit stays open for about 30 minutes, and every page load pushes that window forward. Someone who reads ten pages over an hour without a 30-minute gap is a single event, not ten.

Where the session window does not apply

The 30-minute window is kept in a cookie, so a visitor Chartsy stores nothing for - an EEA/UK visitor on a site with no consent banner wired up, for instance - has no session window at all. Those visits are still deduplicated, but only by the weaker rule below: a page load whose referrer is your own site is never counted. That covers ordinary internal navigation, so most sites see little difference. It does not cover a site that strips referrers (Referrer-Policy: no-referrer), where each page load can be counted separately for those visitors. If most of your traffic is EEA/UK and your site sends no referrers, size your plan closer to pageviews than to sessions.

What creates a visit event

Your tracking script posts a visit to Chartsy when one of the following happens:

A new session starts: A visitor arrives with no open session - a first-time visitor, or a returning one whose previous session has lapsed after roughly 30 minutes without a page load. This is the ordinary case and accounts for nearly all events. The arriving page load has to come from outside your site: if a lapsed session resumes by clicking an internal link, that page load is treated as internal navigation and records nothing.
A new source arrives mid-session: A visitor who landed organically and then, five minutes later, clicks a link tagged with a different source records a second visit. One session can therefore produce more than one event. This is deliberate: without it, the second channel would get no credit for a click it genuinely drove. It is the source that has to change, not the campaign - two links carrying the same utm_source and different utm_campaign values stay one event, and a direct hit part-way through a session never counts as a new source.

Navigating between pages inside an open session never records another visit, no matter how many pages are viewed.

Signups count too

A signup is the second thing that counts. Each signup you track records one event, counted on its own rather than folded into the visit that preceded it - so a visitor who lands on your site and signs up in the same sitting produces two events: the visit, and the signup.

This is the call Growth's setup guide describes as "firing the signup event", and the name is accurate: it is an event in the billed sense, not just a tracking convention. Whether you fire it with a form attribute or a line of code makes no difference to the count. See Set up Growth for how to install it.

Signups are a small share of the total

For most sites signups are a tiny fraction of visits, so they rarely change which tier you need. They matter most if you drive a lot of registrations from traffic Chartsy never saw - an in-app or email flow, say - where signups can outnumber the visits recorded alongside them.

Direct traffic counts

A visit that arrives with no UTM parameter, click ID, referral parameter, or usable referrer is labelled direct and counted like any other event. It is not discarded for being unclassifiable - see Sources, campaigns, launches and instances for how classification works.

What never becomes an event

Some requests reach Chartsy and are rejected before a visit is ever recorded. None of these consume any of your usage:

Bot traffic - requests identifying as crawlers and other automated agents.
Rate-limited addresses - an IP sending an implausible volume of requests.
An unknown or incorrect public key in the tracking snippet.
A domain outside your allowed list - if the origin or page URL is not one of the domains registered for that site, the visit is refused. This is what stops someone else's copy of your snippet consuming your usage.
Opted-out visitors - anyone who has opted out of tracking.
Localhost - excluded by default, so local development does not spend your event allowance.

What is not an event at all

Visits and signups are the whole list. Everything below is uncounted, and none of it adds to your event total no matter how heavily you use it.

Questions asked to ChartsyAI: AI queries are their own thing entirely. Asking about your MRR fifty times in an afternoon does not touch your event count.
Connected data sources: Connecting Stripe, Paddle, or BigCommerce is not an event, and neither is keeping it connected. See Data sources.
Payment activity from your provider: Subscriptions created, payments taken, invoices issued and refunds processed all sync into Chartsy continuously, and none of them are events. A month with a thousand renewals and no site traffic uses no events at all. See Syncing and data freshness.
Your own use of Chartsy: Opening dashboards, running reports, inviting teammates - none of it registers as an event.

How events are totalled

All sites combined. Visits and signups are added together, and if you track several websites on one account their totals are combined rather than counted per site.
Per calendar month. The total covers the current month and resets on the 1st. It is not a trailing 30-day window.
No unique-visitor collapsing. Beyond the session window itself, visits are not deduplicated. The same person returning in a new session counts again, and the same person returning next month counts again in that month too.

Estimating your usage

Because a visit is a session, your event count tracks sessions in a conventional analytics tool far more closely than it tracks pageviews. If you are sizing a plan, start from your session count, add your monthly signups, then allow a little headroom for sessions that pick up a second source partway through.

Events, metrics and metadata

Two neighbouring ideas that are easy to conflate with events. A metric is a calculation over your records rather than an occurrence, and metadata is a descriptive field attached to a record rather than something that happened. Neither is counted, and neither is an event.